| What constituted the threshold experiences in the process of becoming literati men in Tang (618-907) China, and what crises did this process evoke? Did youth have its prerogatives, and how was it understood, imagined, and ultimately represented? In this study of Tang narrative tales, I examine the features and consequences of the literati proto-adult and proto-official as the subject of anecdotes, gossip, and collective reminiscences.While official prose and biographies of the Tang literati elite rarely describe the events prior to their careers as fully formed servants of the state and rarely portray their subjects in the process of becoming, narrative tales on the other hand, authored by the Tang literati, and by nature more heterodox in form and content, are strongly shaped by formative experiences of travel, urban living, and youthful encounters. In these tales, which epitomize mobility and the routinization of chance meetings with the gendered Other as well as the ontological Other, the literatus-to-be enters a liminal life stage en route to taking the civil service examination in the capital of Chang'an.By examining narrative representations of the literatus at the margins, I show that, in the context of an empire that had just begun institutionalizing meritocratic mechanisms of recruitment, the neophyte protagonist so often portrayed in Tang tales exemplifies an ongoing frisson between autonomy and socialization. The circumscribed interval of youthful experiences intimates the tension not only between a young man's self-determination and social legitimation, but also between that of the city - Chang'an with its million inhabitants - and the Tang empire whose emblem it served. By exposing where the social fabric holds the most tension, literary representation of travels to and sojourns in the capital shows us what was most at stake in the collective literati imagination. In the city's spatial contiguities that reorient social relations and reconfigure power, the fledgling literatus's encounters with extra-familial networks, the cult of romance, and alternative life paths constitute an auxiliary education in parallel to, but forever apart from, the canonical and normative education. |
