Abstract
This essay is a preliminary study of the anecdotal past from the Tang 唐 (618–907) as constructed in the Tang yulin 唐語林 (Forest of Conversations on the Tang), a Northern Song 北宋 (960–1127) collection of anecdotes. It measures the “distances” between the contents in the first eighteen transmitted categories of the Tang yulin and the official historical narratives about the Tang by estimating the numbers and percentages of their overlapping accounts. Foregrounding key voices from the past, these anecdotal memories present a cultural image of Tang political and social life and serve the crucial function of conveying popular opinions, collective feelings and perspectives, as well as lasting cultural values and significance. Thus, these fragmentary, miscellaneous accounts, as a whole, constitute a special type of cultural memory that offers a fluid representation of the past in “minute” (wei 微) forms. Rather than a “counterhistory” in the sense of the New Historicist reading, this “minute cultural memory” 微文化記憶, as I term it here, overlaps with and seeps into official historical narratives, and is both factual and fictional: factual in preserving small capsules of cultural reality and emotional and ideological truth, and fictional in integrating its cultural basis with narrative manipulations and embellishments, blurring the boundaries between history, memory, and invention.