Testing the Literary: Prose and the Aesthetic in Early Modern China

What is an “eight-legged essay”? Consult modern anthologists of Ming-Qing literature and you will find most of them generally gloss over this genre in silence. Early twentieth-century literary scholars, particularly the champions of May Fourth New Literature, would offer a more disparaging response. The essay was criticized for its rigidity and for stifling independent thinking and literary creativity. According to the narrative, the essayists primarily employed the “voices of the Sages and Worthies,” essentially delivering a highly structured rendition of Confucian texts devoid of any original insights. Subsequently, the term eight-legged essay evolved into a generic descriptor for dogmatic and formulaic rules, leading to pejorative new coinages such as “foreign eight-legged essay” and “Party eight-legged essay.” However, we are left with a void in our understanding, as unanswered questions remain about why this genre achieved prevalence, the factors contributing to its success, and the eventual transformation into a “reactionary” style of thought and expression. Instead of substantive explanations, what we often encounter is a complacent belief that its origins lie in involution and intransigence.In Testing the Literary, Alexander Des Forges presents a radically different, daring, and thought-provoking reinterpretation of the eight-legged essay, which he prefers to label as shiwen (modern or contemporary prose). Shiwen not only was the standard format for civil service examinations but also “presented a distinctive and crucially significant part of Ming-Qing cultural production” (1). At the core of his exploration lies the intention to depart from the ideological repudiation of the genre and rediscover its essence as a literary practice—“the actual work of writing, reading, and commenting” (3). Of particular importance here is the shi (timeliness) of this self-consciously modern prose. Extant scholarship has emphasized the genre's preoccupation with timeliness, denoting a keen awareness of concurrent cultural and political developments. In connection with this, Des Forges argues that shiwen's characteristic timeliness expands its scope beyond the essays composed and evaluated in examination compounds and signifies a wider domain of discourse that was “unmistakably central to both written production and arguments about the literary in Ming and Qing era” (15). He therefore considers the modern prose essay a “worthy successor to genres such as the rhapsody of the Han, poetry of the Tang, prose or songs of the Song, and drama of the Yuan” (16). Meanwhile, what sets shiwen apart is its hybrid nature: it encompasses a wide array of genres and has a tendency to blend borrowed techniques and attitudes into a more refined, unified fabric. In short, shiwen exemplified the literary undertaking of early modern China and should not be relegated to the peripheries of Chinese literary history.To restore literary practice to a central stage, Des Forges further develops an elaborate analytical framework for evaluating the aesthetic characteristics of shiwen, including the exploration of literary voice, the challenge of representative speech, consideration of narrative structure and textual arrangement, and the cultivation of a distinct individual subjectivity through the act of writing. Each chapter is crafted to challenge the prevailing misconceptions regarding the clichéd and restrictive perception of the eight-legged essay. In this vein, chapter 1 questions the widely held belief that shiwen is a stagnant genre solely echoing the voices of the ancient and lacking any distinct authorial voice. Conversely, speaking in the name of the Sages is not merely a type of repetition but, rather, a renewed act of constituting subjectivity through struggle and contestation. As Des Forges suggests, “The line between representative speech and assertive creation is not always simple to draw” (51). The discourse of “speaking for the Sages and Worthies” should be seen as an enduring struggle between autonomy and subordination. This politics of representation naturally paves the way for the exploration of style, as elaborated in chapter 2. In Des Forges's perspective, the diverse stylistic range within the shiwen genre mirrored the ideological disparities of the participants. Examiners and candidates engaged in a continuous struggle to define what constituted a good essay and a commendable aesthetic. By shaping the aesthetic dimension, they were essentially trying to control, if not monopolize, the fundamental criteria for evaluation. Style was treated as a matter of life and death because literary forms were connected to the recruitment of civil officials and the governance of the state. As a result, dai (representation) is “not a straightforward process of reproducing an already given text in different words” but, rather, “an arena where questions of agency, control, and identity are foregrounded.”The latter portion of the book examines the question of authorial agency through different lenses. Chapter 3 pays attention to one of the most infamous features of the eight-legged essay: parallelism. Indeed, the extensive use of parallelism in shiwen, often mocked as “a thudding echo line by line what comes with deadening regularity” (85), was a target of frequent ridicule. It symbolized the incapacity of the essay writer to construct an original line of argument. Yet Des Forges begs us to reconsider parallelism not as a prescribed set of techniques but as “a distinct mode of writerly and readerly labor” (90). Authors perceived parallelism as a terrain of contention and a method of abstraction, while readers also held differing viewpoints on how precisely parallelism was expressed within the essay. In simpler terms, practicing parallelism in writing and reading can be likened to “dancing with shackles,” or nurturing intellectual creativity within the boundaries of a disciplined syntax. This paradoxical duality is also evident in the issue of establishing a unique individual identity within shiwen. While it may seem counterintuitive to view civil service examination writing as a form of self-expression, Des Forges suggests that shiwen writers did indeed make efforts to bring out one's authentic interior. They did so for two primary reasons. First, on an intellectual level, there was a strong incentive to convey “one's own intention” in their interpretation of canonical texts. Second, from an institutional perspective, because most examination essays were assessed blindly, the ability to write with a unique aesthetic style became even more critical. This was strategic both for the candidates, who sought to distinguish themselves, and for the examiners, who aimed to identify exceptional candidates among the examinees.The chapters are largely effective in reevaluating the aesthetic qualities of shiwen in contrast to presentist, ideologically driven interpretations. In the epilogue, Forges shifts away from the particular aspects of shiwen and raises broader questions: Does the structure of shiwen offer any insights into the bureaucratic mindset of the Ming-Qing era? Do its stylistic traits, such as meticulously balanced parallelism, provide us with any explanation about the involutionary nature of late imperial Chinese governance? In this context, Des Forges courageously connects literary style to unique economic paradigms, but he does not adhere to a simplistic Marxist perspective rooted in the base/superstructure dichotomy. Rather, he perceives a Weberian “elective affinity” between the assiduousness of shiwen writers and diligent labor in the economic domain. In this sense, shiwen served as an “industrious revolution” in literary production, paving the way for a new concept of literary writers, who were seen not merely as literary geniuses but also as creators, marketers, and producers of their work. It also reflected the transient success of China's literary governance—a cohesive, inflexible bureaucratic framework and a talent-selection system that generated a unified and prosperous market for silver, prior to the ascendancy of the Western powers.Des Forges's book is part of a broader scholarly effort to reevaluate the enduring influence of meritocratic examinations in modern China. Unlike the May Fourth generation's dismissive attitudes toward Confucian meritocracy, esteemed historians such as Ping-ti Ho and Benjamin Elman have convincingly argued that the imperial civil examination effectively served as a well-designed “educational gyroscope” and a “ladder of success.” This system maintained a delicate balance between the imperial court and the literati-gentry elite for over five centuries. In connection with this theme, Des Forges seeks to “return to the literary” and reinstates aesthetics as the central characteristic of imperial China's literate administration. In short, one cannot fully probe the politics of shiwen without first considering it in literary terms: style, voice, and representation. Above all, the power of literature lies in the magic of form.