by Fur Tip
Hello. My name is Fur Tip, and I am a rabbit-hair writing brush. I know that is an unusual thing for a book to be narrated by, and I will explain myself before long. But I am not really here to talk about myself. I am here to introduce you to one of the greatest writers China ever produced, and to five strange and wonderful things he wrote — and since I was the brush in his hand when he wrote them, it fell to me to be your guide.
Han Yu is one of the great writers of the Chinese tradition. He lived from 768 to 824, served the Tang state through a difficult career that twice sent him into southern exile, and is remembered as the man who turned classical prose back toward clarity and force after generations of ornament. Schoolchildren still memorize him. He is, by long consensus, one of the finest hands ever to hold a brush.
Among the many things he wrote are five pieces about getting rid of things that did not belong. A crocodile was eating the livestock of a district he governed, so he wrote it a letter and gave it three days to leave. A fever was riding a sick man's bones, so he wrote the fever a send-off. An owl was making a nuisance of itself at night, so he wrote it out of the sky. Poverty would not leave his house, so he wrote it a farewell too — though that one, as you will see, does not go the way the others do. And once, in a stranger mood, he wrote a mock-biography of the writing brush itself.
This book is about those five pieces. It is not a translation, though translations stand behind it and you can consult them if you wish. It is an attempt to say what these texts are actually doing — which turns out to be stranger, and more worth your attention, than "a famous man wrote some clever things about pests."
Here is the argument in short, so you know where we are going. Each of these texts performs the same operation. Something has turned up where it should not be; Han Yu names it, works out what kind of thing it is, and then dispatches it — sends it off, or puts it back, or, in one case, keeps it. Name, sort, dispatch: the same three moves every time, whether the intruder is a real animal or a fever or an abstraction. The moves do not change when the target does. That is the thread this book follows, because once you see it you begin to see what these pieces are really for.
And what they are for is more than pest control. Underneath the crocodile and the fever is a way of running the world — a way of deciding what belongs and what does not, who gets to say so, and what happens to whatever falls on the wrong side of the line. Han Yu wrote these as an official, often an exiled one, and clearing a fever or a crocodile from a place he governed was not so different from the work of empire: naming a frontier, sorting its people, writing it into the order of things. This book will say that plainly. It will not say it as an accusation. To the man at the creek it was good government; to the capital it was fine prose; to the fisherman whose river was cleared of man-eaters it was a real kindness. All of that is true at once, and the reader who reaches only for the cynical reading has missed most of the picture. The aim throughout is to see the whole of it without flattening it — the benefit and the ordering, the kindness and the conquest, in one motion, because in these texts they are one motion.
There are five chapters, one for each text, arranged in the order that makes Han Yu's method easiest to watch at work. The first is the brush's own biography, because it is the whole apparatus in miniature — a thing named, sorted, put to work, used up, and set aside, which is exactly what happens to every crocodile and every fever in the chapters after. Then come the owl, the crocodile, the fever, and the five poverties. By the time you reach the poverties you will know the machine well enough to enjoy watching it fail, which is why the book ends there. You do not need Chinese to follow any of it. Where a character matters — and sometimes a whole reading turns on one — I will give it to you, tell you how it sounds and what it is doing, and you can take my word or go check. Where a point is central I will make it fully and return to it. Where something is merely interesting I will note it and move on.
And now I can explain myself, as I promised. I am the brush Han Yu used to write all five of these pieces — and in one of them he personified me, gave me ancestors and a career and a voice, so I am only borrowing back what he lent me. It is a conceit, plainly. But it earns its keep, because a brush is the right narrator for this material. I was there for all of it. I was the instrument that did the naming and the sorting, the thing that turned each live problem into settled words on a page. That is what a brush is for, and it is what this book is about. So let me walk you through it — beginning, as Han Yu began me, with the story of a captured hare.
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