UC Berkeley

Humans perceive and conceptualize who we are by making a consistent and coherent story of the past. Without making this story, existence is fragmented and dissolved into a series of physical, chemical, or biological states that we can only passively accept. Instead, we recall past moments, selecting and linking them to other ones in a logical manner, composing a reasonable story that explains our existence consistently and coherently. Only by choosing, connecting, and sequencing our experiences and signifying them with concepts, and thereby producing an understandable story, can we identify who we are and what we do.

Constructing a story of the past is similar to composing a narrative fiction whereby we make sense of our identity with pre-existing signifiers, drawing upon values in the culture in order to establish meaning. The moments of existence that are not remembered or not selected in the story-making remain external to the being as if they had never existed. In this regard, we are creatures of our own story. The story provides us with an explanation of our identity through time and legitimizes how we will exist in the future.

Likewise, to identify and explain who the people of a society are and how they should behave, society needs its own story. That is, a society must compose its own story about what it has experienced through time. This group remembrance is referred to as collective memory or social memory—the constructed ideas of particular past event(s) that individuals have communally experienced. The social memory goes through editing processes such as selecting, excluding, elaborating, emphasizing, deleting, and re-sequencing procedures in the pre-existing linguistic, conceptual, ethical, aesthetic orders of the culture. In this sense, society’s story is essentially “fictional” in nature.

Unlike individual/personal memory, however, those who experienced the same past event are plural in the society. Due to this plurality, there is tension resulting from different story-making of the same event in the past. The attempt to compose a different story about the past is not entirely resolved, but remains as a possibility for alternative story.

Diversity in collective memory necessarily causes, in the society, a competition among the plural memories for broader, deeper, and stronger acceptance and recognition of a particular memory by fellow society members. In the contest that is conditioned and affected in political and cultural power-relations, one specific memory and story wins out and becomes prevalent and dominant. It is then imposed and embodied in social regulations such as law and justice, and in cultural practices such as education and mass media. The social story is thus a doing, a performance to be done over and over.

In this regard, what the modern mind has termed as “history” is a society’s own self-constructed story that is narrated, written and re-written by its members out of numerous coexisting and competing memories of the past in a repetitive, reconstructive manner. Concerned more with signifying the identity of the society than with concrete facts, history is a dominant story of the memory that the community has come to approve as the narrativistic legitimation of its own identity through time.

Within this theoretical framework, this thesis studies how “history” emerged in so-called Early China, the period roughly from Warring States (ca. fifth to third century BCE) to Western Han (206 BCE-9 CE). It explores the cultural practice of sharing and transmitting various earlier collective memories of the past by representing them in the form of short narrative to establish an “authentic” and “official” memory, i.e., a “history,” by manipulating, editing, revising, or developing the earlier social memories and adopting a developed version of the memory and discourse into the works that had been canonized as the “true” representation of the past in the cultural tradition.

For this, the current study first pays attention to a genre of writing, which I term “Episode Text.” Often termed as “anecdotes” that assumes to have trivial and inferior nature in cultural significance, the Episode Text represents an earlier social memory of a past event and its narrative representation in the culture. Consisting of a short story in various lengths, about a past event of political or cultural figures and their speech, it is free-standing and self-contained as one independent textual unit in nature.

What makes the Episode Texts significant is that many stories in the Texts are comparable to those of transmitted classics of the past. Assuming that the Episode Text reveals earlier collective memory of the past and its literary representation, we can trace how the social memory of the certain past event has changed and developed. By comparing the parallels between the Episode Texts and received classics of “history,” we can see how earlier memories and stories have evolved or were modified when they were recognized and adopted as a part of the canonical texts in the later culture.

The Episode Text remained relatively unknown and paid less attention to until it was re-discovered and re-signified in modern archaeological excavation projects in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. However, the Episode Text seems already popular in the socio-cultural reality around fourth century BCE, in which a robust cultural need arose for individual political entities to identify their connection to the past, particularly to their great earlier ancestors. The stories offered to explain and legitimize their current status by creating their own stories of the past after the breakdown of the former hegemonic Central State, Western Zhou, which had provided the conceptual, ethical, aesthetic orders to its subordinates with political and cultural power and imposed the Zhou’s story to the subordinate individual entities. In this sense, Episode Texts were made and shared as a social effort for individuated small states to be released from Zhou’s cultural hegemony after its breakdown, to cope with their new socio-political circumstances, to explain their origin, and to justify their existence. This was possible within the changing cultural environment where the one absolute cultural and political power no longer existed, and each entity pursued its own story of the past.

This study focuses on the stories in two canonical classics of “history” in Chinese tradition, Zuozhuan and Shangshu, and compares them to the newly found narratives in the Episode Texts that reflect earlier memories of the same events. This study shows that the creation and establishment of these two seminal texts was a long-term process in which earlier social memories were edited and re-written in various ways, including detailing, refocusing, merging, splitting, re-messaging, re-didacticization, deleting, and excluding.

Notably, the case of textual comparison between the received “Wuyu” in the Guoyu and a bamboo slip manuscript found at Cili, Hubei convincingly suggests that long passages that comprise thousands of written characters in the received “historical” texts such as Guoyu, Zuozhuan, Shangshu may have been formed by merging several separate Episode Texts into a single text coherently. Generally, how later people cognized, conceived of, and understood what had occurred in the early past has been shaped and framed with these key references.

Nonetheless, despite the strong and steady efforts to establish specific memories as a socio-cultural norm in the imperial setting of the Han, there remained intellectual attempts to diverge from the growingly dominant memories and reconstruct “history” from different threads of social memory from earlier days in the culture. These disparate threads of memory were also represented in the form of short narrative and widely shared in the society. They were often explicitly critical about the figures or concepts in the increasingly dominant stories. They pursued alternative values, thoughts, and ideas by employing different personalities and a more fictive and imaginative tone and style. The disparate threads of memory explain the plurality of collective memory and the tension for appropriating the past in the society. The received Zhuangzi text exemplifies the intellectual conflict and struggle for domination in remembering the past in Early China.

The cultural process of constructing, establishing, challenging, and reconstructing the normative discourse of the past through canonizing such works is understood as a part of the never-ending, repetitive process of a society’s own locating, identifying, and legitimating of itself through time. Thus, this thesis concludes that the process was the journey of the early communities to construct and reconstruct themselves as the ideal, the Center State of the cosmos, the state that now is rendered as China. In this course of consolidating discreet memories and producing the dominant ways of remembering and representing the past through canonical texts, the early societies were dreaming of themselves becoming that Center State—namely, China.