後漢における「設論」の變質と解體

Abstract

In the Former Han era, she lun, or hypothetical discours, such as Dongfang Shuo's 東方朔 Ke Nan 客難 and Yang Xiong's 揚雄 Jie Chao 解嘲, were still outside the pale of the literary ideas in those days. In the Later Han era, when she lun took a more stable place in Chinese literature, the influence of the literary ideas utterly transformed the genre. 1. Yang Xiong's shadow--Ban Gu's 班固 Bin Xi 賓戲 and other pieces : Ban Gu and his contemporaries admired Yang Xiong's way of life as expressed in Jie Chao, yet on the other hand they also criticized the comical style and paradoxical content of Jie Chao. In their she lun pieces, they asserted the superiority of their own age and the rightness of their own behaviour in a stiff and idealistic way. This reflects their conflicting feelings for the Former Han culture--feelings of both admiration and opposition. 2. The way of life expressed in she lun : Why did so many Later Han writers imitate Jie Chao? Because they regarded it as an expression of "a sage in frustration 賢人失志". The image of "a sage in frustration", because of its rebellious nature, could not exist under the absolute monarchy of the Han unless it was in a comical and paradoxical form such as Ke Nan or Jie Chao. Since Later Han writers did not approve of the comic and paradoxical elements of she lun, their she lun pieces lost the original style and changed into another kind of literature expressing the conversion to Nature's law, which is the only thing above the authority of the Emperor. 3. The disintegration of she lun : She lun originally was a dialogue, a simple story of an attack and a counterattack. The ideation of the content in Later Han she lun pieces lost the elements of a story. This also made the narrator's persuasion in the piece too abstract and flat, and so it changed into a mere repetition of the same theme, similar to fu 賦. Thus the originality of she lun as a literary genre disintegrated by the end of the Later Han era. Nevertheless, many she lun pieces were written as an expression of faith in Nature's law until a new kind of literature began to describe Nature itself, not Nature's law.