After the Post Cold War The Future of

Chinese History Jinhua Dai

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/after-the-post-cold-war-the-future-of-chinese-history-ji
nhua-dai/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

The Palgrave Handbook of Conflict and History Education

in the Post-Cold War Era Luigi Cajani

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-palgrave-handbook-of-
conflict-and-history-education-in-the-post-cold-war-era-luigi-
cajani/

The future of the world: futurology, futurists, and the

struggle for the post-Cold War imagination First
Edition Andersson

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-future-of-the-world-
futurology-futurists-and-the-struggle-for-the-post-cold-war-
imagination-first-edition-andersson/

The Bibliography Of New Cold War History Csaba Békés

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-bibliography-of-new-cold-
war-history-csaba-bekes/

Iraq After ISIS: The Challenges of Post-War Recovery

Jacob Eriksson

https://textbookfull.com/product/iraq-after-isis-the-challenges-
of-post-war-recovery-jacob-eriksson/
The US Role in NATO’s Survival After the Cold War Julie
Garey

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-us-role-in-natos-survival-
after-the-cold-war-julie-garey/

The Politics Of Peace: A Global Cold War History Petra

Goedde

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-politics-of-peace-a-global-
cold-war-history-petra-goedde/

Autocratization in post-Cold War Political Regimes

Andrea Cassani

https://textbookfull.com/product/autocratization-in-post-cold-
war-political-regimes-andrea-cassani/

The Future of War: A History 1st Edition Freedman

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-future-of-war-a-history-1st-
edition-freedman/

Beyond the Arab cold war : the international history of

the Yemen civil war, 1962-68 1st Edition Orkaby

https://textbookfull.com/product/beyond-the-arab-cold-war-the-
international-history-of-the-yemen-civil-war-1962-68-1st-edition-
orkaby/
 AFTER THE
POST–COLD WAR
 SINOTHEORY

A series edited by Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-­yin Chow

 AFTER THE
POST–COLD WAR

THE FUTURE OF CHINESE HISTORY

Dai Jinhua
Edited and with an
Introduction by Lisa Rofel

Duke University Press Durham and London 2018

© 2018 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free
paper ∞
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Minion by Copperline Book Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Dai, Jinhua, [date] author. | Rofel, Lisa, [date] editor.
Title: After the post–­cold war: the future of Chinese history /
Dai Jinhua ; edited and with an introduction by Lisa Rofel.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Series:
Sinotheory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2018007280 (print)
lccn 2018008408 (ebook)
isbn 9781478002208 (ebook)
isbn 9781478000389 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9781478000518 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: China — Civilization — 21st century. |
China—History—2002– | Motion pictures—China—
History. | Motion pictures and history.
Classification: lcc ds779.43 (ebook) |
lcc ds779.43 .d35 2018 (print) | ddc 951.06 — dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007280

Cover art: Jacqueline Humphries, Untitled, 2013.

Oil and enamel on linen, 72 × 76 in. Courtesy of the
artist and Greene Naftali, New York.
 CONTENTS

Series Editor’s Preface by Carlos Rojas vii

Acknowledgments xi
Editor’s Introduction by Lisa Rofel xiii

Introduction Translated by Jie Li 1

PART I. TRAUMA, EVACUATED MEMORIES,

AND INVERTED HISTORIES
1 I Want to Be Human: A Story of China and the Human 25
Translated by Shuang Shen
2 Hero and the Invisible Tianxia 47
Translated by Yajun Mo

PART II. CLASS, STILL LIVES, AND MASCULINITY

3 Temporality, Nature Morte, and the Filmmaker:
A Reconsideration of Still Life 67
Translated by Lennet Daigle
4 The Piano in a Factory: Class, in the Name of the Father 91
Translated by Jie Li

PART III. THE SPY GENRE

5 The Spy-­Film Legacy: A Preliminary Cultural Analysis
of the Spy Film 109
Translated by Christopher Connery
6 In Vogue: Politics and the Nation-­State in Lust,
Caution and the Lust, Caution Phenomenon in China 127
Translated by Erebus Wong and Lisa Rofel

Finale. History, Memory, and the Politics of Representation 141

Translated by Rebecca E. Karl
Interview with Dai Jinhua, July 2014 160
by Lisa Rofel
Notes 167
Selected Works of Dai Jinhua 181
Bibliography 183
Translators’ Biographies 189
Index 191
 SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

Carlos Rojas

As Dai Jinhua notes in her discussion of Zhang Yimou’s 2003 film Hero in
this volume, the work contains two pivotal scenes in which the swordsman
known as Broken Sword is seen writing Chinese characters. In the first, he
uses a brush dipped in bright red ink to write an enormous version of the
character 劍 (jian, “sword”) on a sheet of paper or fabric, while in the sec-
ond, he uses his sketch to write the two characters 天下 (tianxia, “all under
heaven”) in the desert sand (see accompanying images).
In the first instance, the visual image of Broken Sword’s calligraphic
rendering of jian comes to have an iconic significance in the film. Hung
in the palace behind the king of Qin, the text comes to symbolize the mil-
itary might that would permit the king to conquer the rival states in the
region and establish a unified dynasty. By contrast, in the second instance
all we observe is what Dai Jinhua describes as Broken Sword’s “fluttering-­
sleeved, sword waving posture” (chapter 2, this volume) as he inscribes
the two characters in the sand, and we never see the written characters
themselves. Instead, we learn the content of his short inscription when the
assassin Nameless (who observed Broken Sword writing the two characters
in question) relays the contents of this short message to the king of Qin,
who takes it as an affirmation of his political goals. Equally importantly,
the same message also helps convince Nameless to abandon his own plans
to assassinate the Qin king, precisely so that the king might then be able to
realize his ambitions to establish a unified empire.
The notion of tianxia is, as Dai Jinhua observes, central to Zhang
Yimou’s reimagination of the events leading up to the founding of China’s
first unified dynasty, the Qin (221 – 206 bce), which viewed itself as ruling
over “all under heaven.” Literally meaning “all land under heaven” (in the
subtitles prepared for the U.S. version of Zhang’s film, the term is rendered
simply as “our land”), the concept of tianxia designates an ethnoculturally
Images from Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2003).

grounded understanding of universality, and historically it has been used

to articulate a vision of sociopolitical order within a specifically Chinese
frame of reference.1 Zhang’s film was controversial when it was released
in 2003, because it was seen by viewers as offering an apologia for China’s
history of imperial conquest, and as an indirect commentary on the politi-
cal aspirations of the contemporary Chinese state. Part of that controversy
resonates with a set of parallel discussions of attempts to reappropriate a
traditional notion of tianxia in relation to the contemporary world.
At the same time, this concept of tianxia also metaphorically captures
a central objective of the present volume as a whole, in that as a detailed

viii Series Editor’s Preface

and theoretically informed critical engagement with the sociopolitical con-
figuration of modern China, the volume constitutes an attempt to map a
sociocultural space onto a conceptual order that is both intrinsically part
of that space but at the same time ontologically outside of it (somewhat
like the paradoxes that emerge from Borges’s parable of the “map of the
Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for
point with it”).2 More specifically, this volume is concerned with an anal-
ysis of Chinese film, and in her discussion of the desert calligraphy scene,
Dai notes that “cinema as a genre bases its true text on the image. That
which is not visible, then, lacks signification” (chapter 2). In her own anal-
ysis throughout the volume, Dai similarly attends to the visual specificities
of cinematic works, but at the same time is equally interested in the works’
erasures and blind spots. Her goal, in other words, is to make legible the
works’ occluded sociopolitical and ideological implications in order to con-
sider how the films’ focus on history offers a commentary on a contempo-
rary process of historical amnesia.
Although it is true that written characters for tianxia remain invisible
in Zhang’s film, we are nevertheless shown a thirty-­second sequence of
Broken Sword sketching the characters in the sand, in a series of elaborate
dramatic arm motions that appear to correspond to several long, curved
written strokes. In fact, the writing sequence is so elaborate that many
viewers have speculated that Broken Sword may not have been sketching
the relatively simple characters for tianxia, but rather something different
altogether. Moreover, even if Broken Sword was indeed writing the charac-
ters for tianxia, as is subsequently reported by Nameless, it is nevertheless
unclear which version of the Chinese script Broken Sword is presumed to
have been using in the first place. Before the king of Qin founded the Qin
dynasty in 221 bce, many different versions of the Chinese writing system
were in use in the region that is now China. One of the first things that
the king did upon becoming emperor was to oversee the systematic stan-
dardization of the Chinese script. The Chinese writing system has been
reformed many times since then, most recently in the 1950s under Mao
Zedong, during which over two thousand different characters were sim-
plified (though the previous traditional forms of the characters continue
to be used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other overseas Chinese commu-
nities). When Broken Sword writes the character for sword in the film,
accordingly, he uses not the version of the character in use today (劍), but

Series Editor’s Preface ix

rather a version that closely resembles one preserved in the early dictionary
Shuowen jiezi (Explanation of simple and compound graphs), in which the
character is rendered as . Similarly, although the contemporary version
of the binome tianxia consists of a mere seven nearly straight strokes, 天下,
the rendering of the same two characters in the Shuowen jiezi, , is sig-
nificantly more curvy, and would appear to match more closely what we
observe of Broken Sword’s arm motions as he writes the two characters in
the sand.
On the other hand, even if the characters preserved in the Shuowen
jiezi are indeed presumed to be the model, in Zhang Yimou’s film, for both
Broken Sword’s (visible) rendering of the character for sword and, possibly,
his (invisible) rendering of the binome “all under heaven,” this nevertheless
underscores a fundamental ambiguity within the film itself —which is that
the work is set during the period immediately preceding both the establish-
ment of the Qin dynasty and the ensuing standardization of the Chinese
writing system that was the basis for the compilation of the Shuowen jiezi
three centuries later. The fact of the matter is, we have no real idea what
precisely the Chinese characters written by a historical figure during this
immediate pre-­Qin period would have looked like, and by projecting a vi-
sion of the post-­Qin script back onto the pre-­Qin era, the film is in effect
reproducing in miniature its more general attempt to take a post-­Qin (and,
indeed, contemporary) understanding of tianxia and the Chinese state,
and project it back onto a pre-­Qin moment.
The resulting temporal chiasmus, meanwhile, is the focus not only of
Dai Jinhua’s chapter on Zhang’s Hero, but also of this volume as a whole.
Through a series of incisive analyses of contemporary films dealing with
periods ranging from the pre-­Qin to the contemporary moment, Dai con-
siders the ways in which these works view the past through the lens of the
present, and in the process she argues that they comment ironically on how
the post –Cold War present is constituted through a process of strategically
eliding critical elements of its own past.

x Series Editor’s Preface

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Dai Jinhua and Lisa Rofel would like to thank first and foremost the trans-
lators of the essays in this volume. We appreciate that translation work is
never simple; there is no straightforward correspondence between words
in different languages, especially the kinds of theoretical terms prevalent in
this book. Each term carries a whole cultural history with it. Dai Jinhua’s
dense, creative, and challenging prose makes the translation work all the
more admirable. Thank you all. We would also like to thank the review-
ers of this volume for the care they took in reading carefully through the
essays. Angela Zito, as one of them, conceived a brilliant reordering of the
chapters. Yizhou Guo did the selected bibliography; she and Caroline Kao
helped with final copyediting questions. Karen Fisher carried out graceful
editing. Finally, we would like to thank Ken Wissoker and Elizabeth Ault
for their persistent care in getting this book to publication.
 EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Lisa Rofel

Dai Jinhua is the equivalent of a rock star in China. Students, intellectu-

als, and the general public flock to hear her searing, radical insights into
the enormous transformations in contemporary life — and the injustices
and ills they have wrought. For over two decades she has brought her
feminist Marxism — framed through film theory, psychoanalysis, post-­
structuralism, and cultural studies — to bear as a prescient public intellec-
tual of and for our times. Her works have become celebrated classics of the
academic studies of Chinese cinema. While she locates herself in China—a
deliberate, self-­conscious choice — Dai is equally in dialogue with cultural
theorists from Europe, the United States, Asia, Latin America, and Af-
rica. Dai Jinhua and Meng Yue were the first to initiate post-­Mao feminist
literary criticism in China with their renowned Emerging from the Hori-
zon of History. She also founded the first film theory specialization at the
Beijing Film Academy and established the Institute for Film and Cultural
Studies— the first in China —at the premier Beijing University. Finally, Dai
has participated in numerous global activist organizations, including the
Third World Forum, World Social Forum, and the initiative to nominate
one thousand women for the Nobel Peace Prize, as well as rural women’s
organizations in China.
This collection of her recent essays focuses on questions of history, mem-
ory, and the historical revisionism of the new millennium. As a film the-
orist, Dai uses a specific film in each essay as a touchstone for a broader
discussion of China as it exists today within global capitalism. As she has
stated elsewhere, she departs from approaches that treat film as a text inter-
nal to itself, instead placing each film within a broader cultural discourse
and sociopolitical context.1 Far more than a film critic, Dai is penetrating
and illuminating in addressing the forces, contexts, and incidents in the
imbrication of national and transnational scenarios. This volume follows on
the previous English-­language translation of Dai’s essays, Cinema and De-
sire, edited by Jing Wang and Tani E. Barlow, published over a decade ago.
If, in that earlier collection, Dai analyzed the 1980s in China — what in
retrospect we would call the beginning of the postsocialist era — as a mo-
ment when “history experienced reconstruction,”2 then in this set of essays
she diagnoses symptomatically the first decade of the new millennium,
under the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism, as a moment when history
experiences its own disappearance. Dai is both reading and writing alle-
gories of our contemporary moment, as in her discussion in her introduc-
tion of a discarded, rusty advertising sign with Marxist political pop she
found in the trash heap behind a newly built suburb for the international,
cosmopolitan middle class of Beijing. As she asks in that essay, “Commu-
nism was once a specter from the future floating over the present. Today,
is Marxism a phantom from the past that now and then emerges and takes
shape in the present?”
In all of the films she addresses in this volume with the exception of two,
socialist subjectivity has been hollowed out and forgotten in favor of global,
depoliticized images. The war films and epic narratives, for all their his-
torical sweep and invocations of memory, display the signs of the erasure
of collective politics and social movements that constituted the alternative
narrative of modern China. Dai finds instead the reduction of collective
history into an individual story of trauma, as clearly delineated in films
such as Lu Chuan’s The City of Life and Death (Nanjing! Nanjing! 南京!
南京!), which celebrates the universal image of the human, and among
filmmakers influenced by Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (discussed in the
finale).
One of Dai’s central arguments in this volume is that the erasure of the
past simultaneously forecloses imagining the future. Dai’s abiding con-
cern is that this disappearance of history leaves us with no hope of mov-
ing beyond the degradations of the present into a future that might offer
us a socially just world. With an equal dose of pessimism and passion,
Dai serves up an incisive indictment of our times and calls for a return to
utopian thinking. She urges us to do so by way of the past: to not forget
the important socialist-­inspired utopian thinking that tried to present us
a true alternative to capitalism. Her goal is not a return to socialism — and
certainly not an embrace of Maoism—so much as an excavation of the urge
to find that alternative.

xiv Editor’s Introduction

 The title of this collection, After the Post – Cold War, points toward this
erasure of history. Dai contends that with neoliberal globalization, we have
moved beyond the post – Cold War era. This post-­post – Cold War develop-
ment refers to the forgetting of the previous ideological and political ten-
sions between China’s socialist path and Euro-­American modernization.
The end of the Cold War gave the impression that this conflict had been
replaced by economic globalization, the end of modern history, and the
closure of the political imagination of an alternative future. Yet the global
scramble for supremacy means that a complex mixture of old and new
ideological forces has created the new era of the post-­post – Cold War. Dai
is able to see and diagnose these contradictory forces in the textual detail
of film.
This post-­post – Cold War era begins, in her view, with the U.S. war on
terror, which she argues provides new grounds for globalization. A key
year is 2008, with the financial tsunami; the Sichuan earthquake, which
enabled the visible emergence of China’s new middle class (through its do-
nations and volunteer efforts); the Olympic games held in China; and Chi-
na’s emergence as the United States’ greatest creditor. Indeed, she contends
that the Cold War has been readily forgotten in this era of global capital-
ism, as if it were part of a misty past, or an ancient “scary fairy tale” (see
Dai’s introduction). At the same time, she recalls the legacies of the Cold
War. From the positionality of China, Dai reminds us that the Cold War
was never just a binary. After 1960, China was neither in the camp of the
Soviet Union nor in that of the U.S. Instead, it created an alternative third
world position and set of alliances. From that neither-­nor position, China
offered an alternative development path for formerly colonized countries.
Radical intellectuals and movement revolutionaries around the world were
inspired by some forms of Maoist thought. But Dai, in her fearless quest
for (at least contingent) truth, and her ability to think dialectically without
totalities, goes on to deconstruct that very path, arguing that a dream of
modernization is also part of the problem, not least because of the environ-
mental nightmares it has wrought.
Dai is uncanny in her sense of how to craft a genealogy of the present.
One could say, following Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, that her unique
vision finds its inspiration in the undercommons.3 While Dai positions
herself from within a leftist perspective, she deconstructs the well-­worn de-
bates by and about the so-­called New Left and the neoliberals in China. Dai

Editor’s Introduction xv
is not so easily pigeonholed. In her introduction, for example, she analyzes
their shared nostalgic melancholia for a lost past (albeit different), which
creates blurred thinking about the present. While some would accuse the
left in China of giving the Chinese state a pass, Dai, as shown in these essays,
clearly implicates the Chinese state in the conditions wrought by neoliberal
capitalism. Throughout, she also deconstructs the relation of China to the
West, reminding us of a history when these relations were otherwise —
that is, China’s alliances within the third world. Finally, she analyzes global
anxieties about the so-­called rise of China, as well as the manner in which
China has entered into the fold (borrowing from Deleuze) of neoliberal
capitalism.
Indeed, Dai Jinhua exemplifies the quintessential Deleuzian thinker —
always in motion, restlessly seeking possibilities for impossible thinking.
Her ability to self-­consciously interpret the political unconscious of her
generation of intellectuals is unparalleled. Dai has honed these intellectual
tools since her undergraduate days. Dai was in the cohort of 1978 —the first
generation of students after the Cultural Revolution who entered college
based on the revival of entrance exams, when a full decade of young peo-
ple vied in the competition (see my interview with Dai in this volume).4
The seeds of her feminist thinking began, however, in the previous decade
during the Cultural Revolution. On the one hand, she truly felt that women
and men were treated equally — she was a student cadre and leader of the
group that went together to the countryside during that era. On the other,
she had contradictory experiences for which there was no language.
One of Dai’s first set of explicit conflicts was with the masculinist cri-
tique of Maoist socialism that started just as she entered Beijing Univer-
sity as an undergraduate student. The dominant voices were all from this
masculinist perspective —how Maoist socialism had emasculated men and
masculinized women.5 These voices then ridiculed women with the ad-
monishing prescription “marriage should be your only business,” as many
workplaces in the 1980s laid off urban women in the name of economic
efficiency and growth.
“What is a woman?” became a guiding question Dai pursued in her
studies of literature and later film. For Dai, women’s rights (nüquan zhuyi)
is not the main problem; the main problem is nüxing zhuyi, that is, wom-
en’s consciousness or gender ideology. In China, women had a great deal
of legal rights — at least until the revision of the constitution in the 1980s.

xvi Editor’s Introduction

What was needed was a consciousness of the way women experience a
patriarchal injunction as well as an understanding of the naturalization of
gender discrimination that came with post-­Mao reforms.
During this period (the 1990s), Dai became increasingly disturbed with
both the growing difference between rich and poor and the way the rhet-
oric of gender was used to cover over these seismic social shifts by mak-
ing these problems seem small (i.e., they were only about women). She be-
gan to write about this new kind of violence: the redistribution of wealth,
which also sacrificed women’s lives in the process. Dissatisfied with the
way women’s studies programs addressed women in the new middle class
and used feminist theories for those who benefited from the reforms but
not for those who were exploited, Dai turned to reanalyzing class. Thus,
while Dai’s feminism may seem oblique in this volume, she brings from
feminism an understanding of how to analyze the naturalization of power,
difference, and inequality.
As Dai explains in my interview with her (this volume), given the whole-
sale rejection of Maoist socialism, there was no way in the 1990s to talk
about class, even as a great deal of violence was perpetrated through grow-
ing class inequalities. The language of class was rejected, although the the-
ory of class subtending this language (i.e., Marxist-­inspired theories) was
exactly what was needed. However, as Dai states, those theories originally
inspired by Marx also had their lacunae that needed to be addressed: the
conflicts between the countryside and the city and between different re-
gions of the country; the relations between middle-­class women and the
rural domestic servants they hire, displacing their own oppression onto
these women; and the displacement of dispossession onto gender relations.
Thus, one sees in the essays presented here Dai’s inventive and capacious
approach to class inequalities that takes into account how class is shaped in
and through capital’s originary and uneven accumulation strategies, which
include gender relations, nationalism, and regional disparities.
Dai has also turned for inspiration to third-­world movements and the
theories that subtend them, from Samir Amin’s Third World Forum to
Subcomandante Marcos’s Zapatista Army of National Liberation, from
global environmental movements (she served on the first board of Green-
peace in China) to China’s new rural collective movements. Over the last
fifteen years, then, Dai has brought an assemblage of theoretical tools to
bear on questions about history and memory as they intersect with global

Editor’s Introduction xvii

capitalism and nationalism, most importantly because of the manner in
which China has become imbricated with the global capitalist world.
Dai’s leftist cultural critique in these essays comes after the rapid pri-
vatization and profitization of China’s economy were well under way and
after the discourse about the rise of China became pervasive. Rather than
drawing a division between domestic affairs and global ones, these essays
delineate how China is in the global capitalist world and, equally, how that
world is in China. If, in her earlier work, she was concerned with the ori-
entalizing gaze of the West and the uncritical adoption of Western theories
by Chinese intellectuals, in these essays she builds on those earlier insights,
examining the impossibility of separating the local from the global while
simultaneously insisting on the specificity of Chinese historical experience.
She develops these insights by analyzing contemporary life and ideology
in China while never losing sight of the mutual imbrication of China and
global capitalism. In critiquing China’s global capitalist developments, Dai
repeatedly reminds us of the productive and heuristic potential of the ear-
lier political imagination of China’s twentieth-­century history. In refusing
to forget, she cautions against the alignment of the Chinese middle class
with the global financial elites at the expense of the working people, whose
liberation, mobilization, and newfound subjectivity constitute the essence
of China’s past revolutionary culture. If the middle class has its way, Chi-
na’s touted rise will amount to adding a new player in the global scramble
for wealth, power, and supremacy.
In these essays, Dai brings to bear her mastery of film’s visual techniques
along with her theoretically innovative approach to the interpretation of
contemporary cultural life. While she takes off from a particular film, she
locates in filmic scenes, cinematography, and visual signifiers the political
unconscious of contemporary Chinese life. She has a masterful command
of film language and film technique to interpret contemporary ideas, sen-
timents, and contradictions. In each essay, she further demonstrates the
underlying links and echoes among multiple texts, including video games
and popular novels, that seem at first glance far removed from one another.
Dai thus reads and diagnoses the signs of our times — in film, but also
in material objects and structures of feeling. This is a locational reading
of China, but readers would be misinterpreting Dai’s arguments if they
concluded she is merely doing a study of her country. Rather, she is read-
ing the contemporary global moment as it manifests in and through and

xviii Editor’s Introduction

out of China. Dai thus analyzes the national/political/cultural struggles
enmeshed in film both visually and in terms of content. In these essays,
she emphasizes how these struggles shape the erasure of history. At the
same time, she excavates history in the aporia of these erasures. She does
so in order to task us with the reconstruction of memories otherwise from
those we have been fed in the years after the post– Cold War. She gains in-
sight from globally circulating theories while challenging their pretension
to universality from no location. Her abiding questions are the following:
In this age of “after theory,” how do we define a new and effective social
criticism? Do we need a new historical subject (zhuti)? How do we avoid a
grand narrative? How do we avoid using the kind of historical subject such
as the proletariat but then still think about capitalists? Do we need utopia?
In Part I, “Trauma, Evacuated Memories, and Inverted Histories,” Dai
offers cinematic analysis that lays out one of her most important arguments
in the book: that China’s current situation is the imbrication of unresolved
contradictions: the world (i.e., the global capitalist world dominated by the
West) is always already within China, even as China grapples with its own
self-­image in relation to that world. Chapter 1, “I Want to Be Human: A
Story of China and the Human,” discusses the film City of Life and Death
(Nanjing! Nanjing!), directed by Lu Chuan, a tale of the Nanjing Massacre
by the Japanese during World War II. Dai lays out the dense contextualiza-
tion of the ambiguous status of the Nanjing Massacre (not Hiroshima, not
the Holocaust, never recognized as a human catastrophe) and thereby helps
us to grasp how “China’s” (Dai deliberately uses quotation marks to signify
its contingent narrative status) modern relationship to its own history is
always already seen through a global gaze.6 Dai views the massacre as the
kind of suspended, shared, open trauma whose displaced memory causes
the evacuated subjectivity of the post-­post – Cold War that China suffers
from today. This is the kind of terrible space in which Dai wishes to dwell
in this book. The film is a recuperation of universal humanity through a
portrayal of the Japanese soldier’s Christian humanism purged of blood
and death. The Chinese characters in the film, however, do not get placed
in this universal humanity. But by casting the film in this light, Dai also
slyly makes legible that Lu Chuan’s heavily criticized choice to cast as his
protagonist a sympathetic Japanese soldier was useful in the way it ven-
triloquized, through one of its perpetrators, a regret for the massacre that
the Japanese government has, to this day, been reluctant to express. This

Editor’s Introduction xix

first essay also introduces the important contradiction of the rising middle
class and its role in a concomitant rise of nationalist/culturalist sentiment.
This sets the stage for chapter 2, “Hero and the Invisible Tianxia.” Dai
argues that, like City of Life and Death, Zhang Yimou’s Hero (英雄) mines
history but similarly evacuates it of any meaning that could be used to en-
vision a future for China. It does so by inverting the story of the assassins
of the first emperor, Qin Shihuang, from how to assassinate the king to how
not to assassinate him. The film relies heavily on the term tianxia, or “all
under heaven,” to make this historical inversion appear logical. Tracing the
contemporary use of tianxia by bringing in popular culture sources beyond
the film (video games and fantasy novels), Dai argues that tianxia, instead
of being a space of all under heaven in today’s China, is now associated
with power, conquerors, and hegemony — the “private property of the vic-
tors.” Dai delineates how this new meaning replaces its usage not just in the
imperial past but also under Maoist socialism, thus opening a key theme
in this collection of essays: that the visitations into pre-­twentieth-­century
history are done in the service of outflanking and forgetting China’s rev-
olutionary history of the twentieth century. Tianxia in the film represents
an aporia, or evacuation, of meaning. The social symptomaticity of this
aporia is reflected in the way the film empties out the alternative possibili-
ties (alternatives to modernity and capitalism) that had been contained in
the term, turning it into merely an empty signifier of China. Yet along with
this pessimistic assessment, Dai continually urges us to find resources for
imagining a more just future. Thus, she ends this essay with the query: in
what sense, from which angles, and to what extent can China serve as a
method to sketch an alternative world imaginary?
Part II, “Class, Still Lives, and Masculinity,” offers a close interpreta-
tion of the past, present, and possible future of class in China. There are
two filmmakers, both of whom got their start in independent art cinema,
whom Dai praises for their ability to break through what she calls the “de-
lirium and aphasia” of ahistorical histories. They do so by consistently
portraying the lives of China’s subaltern classes experiencing capitalism’s
intensive exploitations and marginalizations. Jia Zhangke is one of them,
and Zhang Meng is the other. Chapter 3, “Temporality, Nature Morte,
and the Filmmaker: A Reconsideration of Still Life,” discusses one of the
most important films to come out of China in years. Jia Zhangke’s Still Life
(三峡好人) addresses the controversial Three Gorges dam project and the

xx Editor’s Introduction
precarious lives of China’s internal migratory classes. The Three Gorges
reservoir, the largest hydro-­engineering project in Chinese history and the
largest water conservation project in the world, led to a massive forced mi-
gration. Dai analyzes how Jia Zhangke moves aside the grand images at the
heart of mainstream depictions that glorify modernization projects such as
the Three Gorges dam to show us the so-­called insignificant people behind
the canvas. She reads the film as a contemporary Chinese parable about re-
building or drowning, creation or destruction, remembering or repressing.
She puts this film in conversation with documentaries and art installations
about the Three Gorges project and, more generally, about exploitation and
violence. Thus, it is temporality, or the development projects carried out
in the name of progress, that, as Dai states, “sweeps away historical and
natural spaces like a hurricane and rewrites them.”
Chapter 4, “The Piano in a Factory: Class, in the Name of the Father,”
discusses the way the director Zhang Meng breaks through the amnesia
about the socialist past. Here, in a more optimistic vein, Dai argues that
this is almost the only feature film that counters the erasures of history to
depict the tremendous upheavals in the lives of millions of people in China
over the last thirty years. The Piano in a Factory (钢的琴) depicts the lives
of factory workers laid off under the 1980s economic reforms that closed
many bankrupt state-­run enterprises. But rather than a melodrama, this
film is full of black humor, including music and dance sequences, as one of
the main characters rallies his former fellow workers—many of whom have
been forced to turn to a variety of illegal activities — to build a piano for his
daughter, as part of his fight to retain custody of her. Dai’s in-­depth ana­
lysis of the film’s cinematography leads her to conclude that what she calls
Zhang Meng’s “anticinematic” idiom fits with the black humor approach
to the heavy theme of the abandonment of workers in the postsocialist era.
But the film’s formal language also signifies the theme of dignity in labor
and creation. In this sense, the film is a paean to socialist culture’s efforts to
create new human beings, even as it also highlights the lost masculinity—
as “masters of the country” — of the former working class.
In Part III, “The Spy Genre,” Dai takes up the spy as a pretext for a
film genre that was popular during the Cold War and that has recently
been revived. In its historical genre, Dai interprets the spy as a brilliant
figure through which to apprehend the sufferings and failings in the strug-
gles for personal and political identity under the pressures of the socialist

Editor’s Introduction xxi

experiment and its bruising campaigns. In its more recent recasting, Dai
sees a genuine anxiety over identity. In chapter 5, “The Spy-­Film Legacy:
A Preliminary Cultural Analysis of the Spy Film,” Dai argues that, in true
spy-­film genre, the spy film itself is not what it seems. Dai first reviews the
Cold War history of the spy film, finding that despite the mutual isolation
of enemies from each other’s cultures, the spy-­film narrative subgenre is
distinctive in being the only type of film, nearly without exception, to cross
Cold War boundaries and antagonisms. Moreover, China made spy films
as well, despite its lack of attachment to either side of the Cold War binary.
Dai further argues that the spy film departs from other popular films in
its treatment of gender. Chinese films from the 1950s to the 1970s made
illegitimate the scopic desire of the male subject; not so the spy film, in
which the treacherous female is in fact the activator of scopic dynamism.
Dai then addresses the film’s current popular revival, arguing that the cur-
rent spy films, unlike Cold War – era spy films, exude hesitation and self-­
doubt about identity. In Dai’s view, the spy films in the post – Cold War era
address the abyss that has opened up between society and memory. They
portray a world split with cracks and fissures, as they continue to address
unresolved questions around the basic nature of the nation-­state itself, and
of personal and national identity. In this essay, rather than analyze one film
in depth, Dai offers an overview of the breadth of spy films from the 1940s
to the present, both nationally and internationally.
Chapter 6, “In Vogue: Politics and the Nation-­State in Lust, Caution
and the Lust, Caution Phenomenon in China,” interprets Ang Lee’s film
Lust, Caution (色·戒 ) — a hit throughout the Chinese-­speaking world — as
resolving the contradiction between the legitimacy of a communist regime
dependent on socialist ideology and the reality of class division with Chi-
na’s full turn to capitalism. The film addresses patriotic resistance to Japa-
nese military rule in the period leading up to World War II. The film avoids
previous interpretations of this history, which highlighted the struggles
between communists and nationalists, and their quite different forms of
resistance. Instead, it addresses a group of elite students who infiltrate the
Chinese government installed by the Japanese military regime. Dai ar-
gues that the film presents a depoliticized history of the twentieth century,
framed within a patriotism that enables the evasion of history and politics.
Dai further argues that Lust, Caution’s popular, and somewhat controver-

xxii Editor’s Introduction

sial, reception delineates a genealogy of China’s new middle class and its
cosmopolitanism. Dai concludes that the film has constructed a floating
stage detached from history in an age of globalization. In the two films
presented in this part, Dai thus develops her uncompromising analysis of
the formation of the subject and subjectivity in relation to global politics,
history, and memory.
The “Finale,” “History, Memory, and the Politics of Representation,”
takes off from Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and its influence on the fifth
generation of Chinese filmmakers to reflect on the transformations in his-
torical writing in the last half of the twentieth century and the first decade
of the twenty-­first century. Dai argues that Bertolucci used the individual
(in the person of the last emperor of the Qing dynasty [1644 – 1911], who be-
came a puppet emperor under Japanese colonialism) to erase the history
of modern China by using space and stereotypical historical background
settings to de-­historicize historical events. She argues that Chinese films
have adopted his approach, similarly using space to erase time or the tem-
porality of twentieth-­century struggles for alternatives to capitalist mo-
dernity. Since the beginning of economic reforms, Dai contends, historical
writing has deconstructed mass memory by using individual experience
and memory so as to call into question any critique of the past. At the same
time, paradoxically, there has been a deep self-­awareness of the significance
of history for politics and culture. Dai argues that China has seen what she
calls the “reversal of the reversal,” that is, a rejection of the socialist history
of China’s past and a restoration of the mainstream logic of the modern
world. Dai diagnoses a current sociopolitical difficulty that China faces: the
continuation of Communist Party rule along with an economic and polit-
ical rupture with the past. This tension produces dilemmas for interpreta-
tions of the past: is there a continuation of past ideologies or the construc-
tion of new ones? The result has been what she calls ahistorical histories.
Finally, I have also included a brief interview I conducted with Dai in
the summer of 2014 as well as a selected bibliography of her books.
These lucid, inspiring essays together offer a scathing indictment of the
way global capitalism has eviscerated hopes of a better world. In a talk en-
titled “A Cultural Landscape without Coordinates” that Dai delivered at
the University of California, Santa Cruz, she spoke of how cultural critics
in China have lost the means to describe the realities of the present. She

Editor’s Introduction xxiii

diagnoses our current ills with uncompromising insight, while she goads
us not to give up on dreams of a better world. True to her uncompromising
commitment to refuse the cynicism of the current moment, Dai ended her
talk by invoking a popular slogan from the May 1968 uprisings in Paris:
“All Power to the Imagination.”

xxiv Editor’s Introduction

 INTRODUCTION

Translated by Jie Li

Prologue

In 2009, I went to Beijing’s satellite city, the new district of Wangjing, to

visit a German curator who was living in an avant-­garde artist’s studio. The
neighborhood of my destination did not have a Chinese name. Its English
name was Class.
My taxi driver used to be a farmer in the Beijing suburbs and had only
recently begun this not-­so-­easy livelihood of the taxi business. He got com-
pletely lost in this brand-­new, nameless urban labyrinth.
On the streets of this new phantasmic district, we could see only the
flying dust in the afternoon sunshine over the recently cleared grounds
that had yet to be laid with grass. Apart from construction trucks and
migrant workers, the streets were eerily silent and unlike Beijing — as if
nobody lived there.
On the margins of this new neighborhood were crumbling old neigh-
borhoods constructed in the 1970s and ’80s that were still bustling with
activity. But when passersby were asked about Class, they looked only be-
wildered by the English word.
The enormous new district looked not so much like the little town in
The Truman Show as a deserted city in one of Michelangelo Antonioni’s
films. When we finally located the so-­called Class neighborhood with the
help of the taxi company’s customer service, I realized that we had passed
by this stretch of buildings many times. The huge letters of the word “Class”
towered over the skyscrapers that formed part of the skyline.
The buildings exuded an aura of classy residence. Their automated
doors were tightly shut; there were gentle hills and lawns, birds and flow-
ers, children with different skin colors playing soccer — the scenery of an
international middle class.
 The nondescript bronze plaque next to the gate stated something to
the effect of “private residence; no solicitations.” There were two security
guards in uniform — one was taking great pains to interrogate a visitor be-
fore me, and the other had stopped a delivery van and was confirming his
comings and goings with his walkie-­talkie. Neither had time to pay any
attention to me.
Since I was early, I walked around the outer walls of the compound and
found myself at the end of a back wall beyond the reach of the sun. Next to
a pile of construction garbage, I found a cast iron structure or a piece of ur-
ban sculpture. I thought perhaps it was made by the architecture firm, with
the signature of the designer. It looked quite grand. I went up for a closer
look. Written in German and Chinese were the words: “Base determines
superstructure. — Karl Marx.”
Like all cast iron, it was rusty where rainwater had soaked it. It was as if
the traces of rust told a tale of the etching and decay of time. I stood there
amazed. I knew that it used to be quite a fad to use the rhetoric of political
pop for Beijing’s real estate commercials and that cast iron was an interna-
tional architectural fashion. Yet this work still stunned me for a moment,
as if I had walked into an anachronistic world and encountered an allegory
of contemporary China.
It seemed as if I had found a boundary stone of history at the end of
history, and the reality of class in a place at the city’s edge literally named
Class. In today’s China, questions of class are no longer explicitly named
as such in political science or sociology. Sometimes people euphemisti-
cally talk about social strata or obscurely about differences. The most di-
rect expressions are about the rich and the poor (their polarization, the
Gini coefficient, the nouveau riche versus the nouveau poor, the elite versus
the subaltern, the entrepreneurs versus the weak). For me, this chance en-
counter revealed the landscape of contemporary urban China; it became a
possible entry to reflect on and evaluate China, and perhaps the world and
its contemporary culture.
The Cold War, this most important, endlessly long era of global twentieth-­
century history, seems to have vanished without a trace, as if it were a
short-­lived illusion far beyond reach, like a nightmare in an ancient, hard-­
to-­recall, and somewhat scary fairy tale. Before my encounter with Class in
Beijing, I was invited to visit Freie Universität Berlin. The open-­air book-
stalls and bookstores featured a magazine with a portrait of Marx on its

2 Introduction
cover, which looked quite striking in the Berlin cityscape. My German
friend told me it was a special issue on the financial tsunami, and that the
title of the story read, “He Said It Long Ago.”
Marx or Marxism: a totally discarded and forgotten history? A con-
tinuing present? Or a future still to be anticipated? Such a familiar signifier
appeared in this sudden and bizarre way, intimating a new international
order. In The Communist Manifesto, communism was once a specter from
the future floating over the present. Today, is Marxism a phantom from the
past that now and then emerges and takes shape in the present?

China: Cold War, Post – Cold War, Displaced Time

Needless to say, the most prominent transformation in twenty-­first-­century

China is its emergence as a nation-­state within the system of global capi-
talism. Beyond that, we could speak of the desires and anxieties in various
international discourses attendant upon China as a potential new empire.
The Cold War order was once the basic parameter defining China’s po-
sition: a forefront socialist nation that faced off against the Western world,
as well as an oddity that rejected the Soviet bloc. Surrounded by strong
enemies on the international front, China’s tenacious survival as well as its
political, economic, and cultural practices made it appear to be a special
case. Yet what stands out even more is its distinctive status as a represen-
tative of the third world.
One could say that it was precisely the political and economic exper-
iments of the 1960s and ’70s in China that turned Mao Zedong Thought
or Maoism into an intellectual resource for Europe and the United States,
turning the Chinese revolutionary path into a topic of relevance for the
world.
Yet if China of the Cold War era used third worldism to break through
the isolation and embargo imposed on it (as if it were an extra chess piece
in a binary order), then these efforts to crack the iciness not only shattered
the pattern of the Cold War order, but also provided an alternative model
for the transformation of the socialist path into a zigzagging route to mod-
ernization, affirming political sovereignty, encouraging industrialization,
and standing tall within the world of nations. Thus temporal narratives
and modernist apprehensions that filled China’s twentieth-­century era re-
peatedly surfaced and were repeatedly displaced.

Introduction 3
 One could say that the 1911 revolution began China’s history as a modern
nation. The Western calendar replaced the agricultural and dynastic calen-
dars and signified that “China” had finally gained a sense of “time”—world
history or so-­called linear historical time.
Then the founding of the People’s Republic of China seemed to pro-
claim once again that Time had begun, with 1949 as Year One, implying
China’s entrance into world history as an independent and sovereign na-
tion. It also signified a form of red or political periodization, suggesting
that the People’s Republic had entered into Marxist-­Leninist (people’s) his-
torical time that marched toward the future promise of a classless society.
Or we could say that the Sino-­U.S. Joint Communiqué in 1972 was an-
other turning point, with Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening beginning
a post – Cold War era within the socialist camp even before the end of the
Cold War. Time itself was foreshortened, displaced from communist uto-
pian processes into global capitalist time. This time-­space enunciated the
idea that China was (once again) marching toward the world. Within an
imaginary of stagnation, China was forever chasing after the West.
World revolution became a distant memory. By the 1970s, China’s vision
of itself as a world revolutionary leader began to fade. By the 1980s, this
landscape became inverted and critically judged.
An interesting fact is that China’s prosperous New Era was not acciden-
tally synchronous with the rise of global neoliberalism. By the end of the
1970s, as the entire Chinese society settled accounts with itself, if it wasn’t
merely reciting the neoliberal canons that originated in the West, then it
was at least adding an effective footnote. China’s transformation also con-
tributed to the reorientation of continental and especially French political
thought that was settling accounts with European leftist intellectuals.
Without a doubt, the turning point and event in China with interna-
tional implications was the 1989 Tiananmen movement. Threatening the
regime for the first time since 1949 and tragically crushed with brutal
military force, this citizens’ resistance movement nevertheless helped the
collapse or implosion of the socialist camp. One can see it as the first dom-
ino in a global domino effect. Yet ironically, as these changes led to the
end of the Cold War and a redrawing of the world geopolitical map, China
became the last infallible socialist giant, falling into a post – Cold War
cold war.
Hence China Time became disjointed from world historical time once

4 Introduction
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
new church. They were ministers of the gospel, who ministered with
fire and sword unto the savages whom they strove to convert;
believers, who being persecuted in Europe, hunted out of Europe,
and cast away upon the shores of America, set up a new war of
persecution here—even here—in the untrodden—almost
unapproachable domain of the Great Spirit of the Universe; pursued
their brethren to death, scourged, fined, imprisoned, banished,
mutilated, and where nothing else would do, hung up their bodies
between heaven and earth for the good of their souls; drove mother
after mother, and babe after babe, into the woods for not believing as
their church taught; made war upon the lords of the soil, the savages
who had been their stay and support while they were strangers, and
sick and poor, and ready to perish, and whom it was therefore a duty
for them—after they had recovered their strength—to make happy
with the edge of the sword; such war as the savages would make
upon the wild beast—way-laying them by night, and shooting them to
death, as they lie asleep with their young, without so much as a
declaration of war; destroying whithersoever they went, whatsoever
they saw, in the shape of a dark man, as if they had authority from
above to unpeople the woods of America; firing village after village,
in the dead of the night—in the dead of winter too—and going to
prayer in the deep snow, while their hands were smoking with
slaughter, and their garments stiffening with blood—the blood, not of
warriors overthrown by warriors in battle, but of the decrepit, or sick,
or helpless; of the aged man, or the woman or the babe—set fire to
in their sleep.—Such were the men of Massachusetts-Bay, at the
period of our story, and he was their political chief.
He had acquired a large property and the title of Sir; a title which
would go a great way at any time among the people of New-
England, who whatever else they may be, and whatever they may
pretend, are not now, and were not during the governship of Sir
William Phips, at the period we refer to, and we dare say, never will
be, without a regard for titles and birth, and ribbons, and stars, and
garters, and much more too, than would ever be credited by those
who only judge of them by what they are pleased to say of
themselves in their fourth-of-July orations. His rank and wealth were
acquired in rather a strange way—not by a course of rude mercantile
adventure, such as the native Yankee is familiar with from his birth,
through every unheard-of sea, and along every unheard-of shore;
but by fishing up ingots of gold, and bars of silver, from the wreck of
a Spanish hulk, which had been cast away on the coast of La Plata,
years and years before, and which he had been told of by Mr. Paris,
the minister of Salem,—a worthy, studious, wayward man, who had
met with some account of the affair, while rummaging into a heap of
old newspapers and ragged books that fell in his way.
Another would have paid no attention, it is probable, to the advice of
the preacher—a man who had grown old in poring over books that
nobody else in that country had ever met with or heard of; but the
hardy New-Englander was too poor and too anxious for wealth to
throw a chance away; and having satisfied himself in some degree
about the truth of a newspaper-narrative which related to the ship, he
set sail for the mother country, received the patronage of those, who
if they were not noblemen, would be called partners in every such
enterprise, with more than the privilege of partners—for they
generally contrive to take the praise and the profit, while their
plebeian associates have to put up with the loss and the reproach;
found the wreck, and after a while succeeded in weighing a
prodigious quantity of gold and silver. He was knighted in
“consequence,” we are told; but in consequence of what, it would be
no easy matter to say: and after so short an absence that he was
hardly missed, returned to his native country with a new charter,
great wealth, a great name, the title of Sir, and the authority of a
chief magistrate.
Such are a few of the many facts which every body that knew him
was acquainted with by report, and which nobody thought of
disbelieving in British-America, till the fury about witches and
witchcraft took possession of the people; after which they began to
shake their heads at the story, and getting more and more courage
as they grew more and more clear-sighted, they went on doubting
first one part of the tale, and then another, till at last they did not
scruple to say of their worthy Governor himself, and of the aged Mr.
Paris, that one of the two—they did not like to say which—had got
above their neighbors’ heads, after all, in a very strange way—a very
strange way indeed—they did not like to say how; and that the
sooner the other was done with old books, the better it would be for
him. He had a Bible of his own to study, and what more would a
preacher of the Gospel have?
Governor Phips and Matthew Paris were what are called neighbors
in America. Their habitations were not more than five leagues apart.
The Governor lived at Boston, the chief town of Massachusetts-Bay,
and the preacher at Naumkeag, in a solitary log-house, completely
surrounded by a thick wood, in which were many graves; and a rock
held in great awe by the red men of the north, and avoided with
special care by the whites, who had much reason to believe that in
other days, it had been a rock of sacrifice, and that human creatures
had been offered up there by the savages of old, either to
Hobbamocko, their evil deity, or to Rawtantoweet, otherwise
Ritchtau, their great Invisible Father. Matthew Paris and Sir William
Phips had each a faith of his own therefore, in all that concerned
witches and witchcraft. Both were believers—but their belief was
modified, intimate as they were, by the circumstances and the
society in which they lived. With the aged, poor and solitary man—a
widower in his old age, it was a dreadful superstition, a faith mixed
up with a mortal fear. With the younger and richer man, whose hope
was not in the grave, and whose thoughts were away from the
death-bed; who was never alone perhaps for an hour of the day; who
lived in the very whirl of society, surrounded by the cheerful faces of
them that he most loved on earth, it wore a less harrowing shape—it
was merely a faith to talk of, and to teach on the Sabbath day, a
curious faith suited to the bold inquisitive temper of the age. Both
were believers, and fixed believers; and yet of the two, perhaps, the
speculative man would have argued more powerfully—with fire and
sword—as a teacher of what he believed.
About a twelvemonth before the enterprise to La Plata, whereby the
“uneducated man of low birth” came to be a ruler and a chief in the
land of his nativity, Matthew Paris the preacher, to whom he was
indebted for a knowledge of the circumstances which led to the
discovery, had lost a young wife—a poor girl who had been brought
up in his family, and whom he married not because of her youth, but
in spite of her youth; and every body knew as he stood by her grave,
and saw the fresh earth heaped upon her, that he would never hold
up his head again, his white venerable head, which met with a
blessing wherever it appeared. From that day forth, he was a
broken-hearted selfish man, weary of life, and sick with
insupportable sorrow. He began to be afraid with a strange fear, to
persuade himself that his Father above had cast him off, and that for
the rest of his life he was to be a mark of the divine displeasure. He
avoided all that knew him, and chiefly those he had been most
intimate with while he was happy; for their looks and their speech,
and every change of their breath reminded him of his poor Margaret,
his meek beautiful wife. He could not bear the very song of the birds
—nor the sight of the green trees; for she was buried in the summer-
time, while the trees were in flower, and the birds singing in the
branches that overshadowed her grave; and so he withdrew from the
world and shut himself up in a dreary solitude, where neglecting his
duty as a preacher of the gospel, he gave up his whole time to the
education of his little daughter—the child of his old age, and the live
miniature of its mother—who was like a child, from the day of her
birth to the day of her death. His grief would have been despair, but
for this one hope. It was the sorrow of old age—that insupportable
sorrow—the sorrow of one who is ready to cry out with every sob,
and at every breath, in the desolation of a widowed heart, whenever
he goes to the fireside or the table, or sees the sun set, or the sky
change with the lustre of a new day, or wakes in the dead of the
night from a cheerful dream of his wife—his dear, dear wife, to the
frightful truth; finding the heavy solitude of the grave about him, his
bridal chamber dark with the atmosphere of death, his marriage bed
—his home—his very heart, which had been occupied with a blessed
and pure love a moment before, uninhabited forever.
His family consisted now of this one child, who was in her tenth year,
a niece in her twelfth year, and two Indians who did the drudgery of
the house, and were treated as members of the family, eating at the
same table and of the same food as the preacher. One was a female
who bore the name of Tituba; the other a praying warrior, who had
become a by-word among the tribes of the north, and a show in the
houses of the white men.
The preacher had always a belief in witchcraft, and so had every
body else that he knew; but he had never been afraid of witches till
after the death of his wife. He had been a little too ready perhaps to
put faith in every tale that he heard about apparition or shadow, star-
shooting or prophecy, unearthly musick, or spirits going abroad
through the very streets of Salem village, and over the green fields,
and along by the sea shore, the wilderness, the rock and the hill-top,
and always at noon-day, and always without a shadow—shapes of
death, who never spoke but with a voice like that of the wind afar off,
nor moved without making the air cold about them; creatures from
the deep sea, who are known to the pious and the gifted by their
slow smooth motion over the turf, and by their quiet, grave,
unchangeable eyes. But though he had been too ready to believe in
such things, from his youth up, he had never been much afraid of
them, till after he found himself widowed forever, as he drew near,
arm in arm with an angel, to the very threshold of eternity; separated
by death, in his old age, from a good and beautiful, and young wife,
just when he had no other hope—no other joy—nothing but her and
her sweet image, the babe, to care for underneath the sky. Are we to
have no charity for such a man—weak though he appear—a man
whose days were passed by the grave where his wife lay, and whose
nights were passed literally in her death-bed; a man living away and
apart from all that he knew, on the very outskirts of the solitude,
among those who had no fear but of shadows and spirits, and
witchcraft and witches? We should remember that his faith after all,
was the faith, not so much of the man, as of the age he lived in, the
race he came of, and the life that he led. Hereafter, when posterity
shall be occupied with our doings, they may wonder at our faith—
perhaps at our credulity, as we now wonder at his.
But the babe grew, and a new hope flowered in his heart, for she
was the very image of her mother; and there was her little cousin
too, Bridget Pope, a child of singular beauty and very tall of her age
—how could he be unhappy, when he heard their sweet voices
ringing together?
 CHAPTER IV.
Bridget Pope was of a thoughtful serious turn—the little Abby the
veriest romp that ever breathed. Bridget was the elder, by about a
year and a half, but she looked five years older than Abby, and was
in every way a remarkable child. Her beauty was like her stature,
and both were above her age; and her aptitude for learning was the
talk of all that knew her. She was a favorite every where and with
every body—she had such a sweet way with her, and was so unlike
the other children of her age—so that when she appeared to merit
reproof, as who will not in the heyday of innocent youth, it was quite
impossible to reprove her, except with a mild voice, or a kind look, or
a very affectionate word or two. She would keep away from her slate
and book for whole days together, and sit for half an hour at a time
without moving her eyes off the page, or turning away her head from
the little window of their school-house, (a log-hut plastered with blue
clay in stripes and patches, and lighted with horn, oiled-paper and
isinglass) which commanded a view of Naumkeag, or Salem village,
with a part of the original woods of North America—huge trees that
were found there on the first arrival of the white man, crowded
together and covered with moss and dropping to pieces of old age; a
meeting-house with a short wooden spire, and the figure of death on
the top for a weather-cock, a multitude of cottages that appeared to
be lost in the landscape, and a broad beautiful approach from the
sea.
Speak softly to Bridget Pope at such a time, or look at her with a look
of love, and her quiet eyes would fill, and her childish heart would
run over—it would be impossible to say why. But if you spoke
sharply to her, when her head was at the little window, and her
thoughts were away, nobody knew where, the poor little thing would
grow pale and serious, and look at you with such a look of sorrow—
and then go away and do what she was bid with a gravity that would
go to your heart. And it would require a whole day after such a
rebuke to restore the dye of her sweet lips, or to persuade her that
you were not half so angry as you might have appeared. At every
sound of your voice, at every step that came near, she would catch
her breath, and start and look up, as if she expected something
dreadful to happen.
But as for Abigail Paris, the pretty little blue-eyed cousin of Bridget
Pope, there was no dealing with her in that way. If you shook your
finger at her, she would laugh in your face; and if you did it with a
grave air, ten to one but she made you laugh too. If you scolded her,
she would scold you in return but always in such a way that you
could not possibly be angry with her; she would mimic your step with
her little naked feet, or the toss of your head, or the very curb of your
mouth perhaps, while you were trying to terrify her. The little wretch!
—everybody was tired to death of her in half an hour, and yet
everybody was glad to see her again. Such was Abigail Paris, before
Bridget Pope came to live in the house with her, but in the course of
about half a year after that, she was so altered that her very play-
fellows twitted her with being “afeard o’ Bridgee Pope.” She began to
be tidy in her dress, to comb her bright hair, to speak low, to keep
her shoes on her feet, and her stockings from about her heels, and
before a twelvemonth was over, she left off wading in the snow, and
grew very fond of her book.
They were always together now, creeping about under the old
beach-trees, or hunting for hazle nuts, or searching for sun-baked
apples in the short thick grass, or feeding the fish in the smooth clear
sea—Bridget poring over a story that she had picked up, nobody
knows where, and Abigail, whatever the story might be, and although
the water might stand in her eyes at the time, always ready for a roll
in the wet grass, a dip in the salt wave, or a slide from the very top of
the haymow. They rambled about in the great woods together on tip-
toe, holding their breath and saying their prayers at every step; they
lay down together and slept together on the very track of the wolf, or
the she-bear; and if they heard a noise afar off, a howl or a war-
whoop, they crept in among the flowers of the solitary spot and were
safe, or hid themselves in the shadow of trees that were spread out
over the whole sky, or of shrubbery that appeared to cover the whole
earth—
 Where the wild grape hangs dropping in the shade,
O’er unfledged minstrels that beneath are laid;

Where the scarlet barberry glittered among the sharp green leaves
like threaded bunches of coral,—where at every step the more
brilliant ivory-plumbs or clustered bunch-berries rattled among the
withered herbage and rolled about their feet like a handful of beads,
—where they delighted to go even while they were afraid to speak
above a whisper, and kept fast hold of each other’s hands, every
step of the way. Such was their love, such their companionship, such
their behaviour while oppressed with fear. They were never apart for
a day, till the time of our story; they were together all day and all
night, going to sleep together and waking up together, feeding out of
the same cup, and sleeping in the same bed, year after year.
But just when the preacher was ready to believe that his Father
above had not altogether deserted him—for he was ready to cry out
with joy whenever he looked upon these dear children; they were so
good and so beautiful, and they loved each other so entirely; just
when there appeared to be no evil in his path, no shadow in his way
to the grave, a most alarming change took place in their behavior to
each other. He tried to find out the cause, but they avoided all
inquiry. He talked with them together, he talked with them apart, he
tried every means in his power to know the truth, but all to no
purpose. They were afraid of each other, and that was all that either
would say. Both were full of mischief and appeared to be possessed
with a new temper. They were noisy and spiteful toward each other,
and toward every body else. They were continually hiding away from
each other in holes and corners, and if they were pursued and
plucked forth to the light, they were always found occupied with
mischief above their age. Instead of playing together as they were
wont, or sitting together in peace, they would creep away under the
tables and chairs and beds, and behave as if they were hunted by
something which nobody else could see; and they would lie there by
the hour, snapping and snarling at each other, and at everybody that
passed near. They had no longer the look of health, or of childhood,
or of innocence. They were meagre and pale, and their eyes were
fiery, and their fingers were skinny and sharp, and they delighted in
devilish tricks and in outcries yet more devilish. They would play by
themselves in the dead of the night, and shriek with a preternatural
voice, and wake everybody with strange laughter—a sort of
smothered giggle, which would appear to issue from the garret, or
from the top of the house, while they were asleep, or pretending to
be dead asleep in the great room below. They would break out all
over in a fine sweat like the dew on a rose bush, and fall down as if
they were struck to the heart with a knife, while they were on the way
to meeting or school, or when the elders of the church were talking
to them and every eye was fixed on their faces with pity or terror.
They would grow pale as death in a moment, and seem to hear
voices in the wind, and shake as with an ague while standing before
a great fire, and look about on every side with such a piteous look for
children, whenever it thundered or lightened, or whenever the sea
roared, that the eyes of all who saw them would fill with tears. They
would creep away backwards from each other on their hands and
feet, or hide their faces in the lap of the female Indian Tituba, and if
the preacher spoke to them, they would fall into a stupor, and awake
with fearful cries and appear instantly covered all over with marks
and spots like those which are left by pinching or bruising the flesh.
They would be struck dumb while repeating the Lord’s prayer, and all
their features would be distorted with a savage and hateful
expression.
The heads of the church were now called together, and a day of
general fasting, humiliation and prayer was appointed, and after that,
the best medical men of the whole country were consulted, the pious
and the gifted, the interpreters of dreams, the soothsayers, and the
prophets of the Lord, every man of power, and every woman of
power,—but no relief was had, no cure, no hope of cure.
Matthew Paris now began to be afraid of his own child. She was no
longer the hope of his heart, the joy his old age, the live miniature of
his buried wife. She was an evil thing—she was what he had no
courage to think of, as he covered his old face and tore his white hair
with a grief that would not be rebuked nor appeased. A new fear fell
upon him, and his knees smote together, and the hair of his flesh
rose, and he saw a spirit, and the spirit said to him look! And he
looked, and lo! the truth appeared to him; for he saw neighbour after
neighbour flying from his path, and all the heads of the church
keeping aloof and whispering together in a low voice. Then knew he
that Bridget Pope and Abigail Paris were bewitched.
A week passed over, a whole week, and every day and every hour
they grew worse and worse, and the solitude in which he lived, more
dreadful to him; but just when there appeared to be no hope left, no
chance for escape, just when he and the few that were still
courageous enough to speak with him, were beginning to despair,
and to wish for the speedy death of the little sufferers, dear as they
had been but a few weeks before to everybody that knew them, a
discovery was made which threw the whole country into a new
paroxysm of terror. The savages who had been for a great while in
the habit of going to the house of the preacher to eat and sleep
“without money and without price,” were now seen to keep aloof and
to be more than usually grave; and yet when they were told of the
children’s behaviour, they showed no sort of surprise, but shook their
heads with a smile, and went their way, very much as if they were
prepared for it.
When the preacher heard this, he called up the two Indians before
him, and spoke to Tituba and prayed to know why her people who
for years had been in the habit of lying before his hearth, and eating
at his table, and coming in and going out of his habitation at all hours
of the day and night, were no longer seen to approach his door.
“Tituppa no say—Tituppa no know,” she replied.
But as she replied, the preacher saw her make a sign to Peter
Wawpee, her Sagamore, who began to show his teeth as if he knew
something more than he chose to tell; but before the preacher could
rebuke him as he deserved, or pursue the inquiry with Tituba, his
daughter screamed out and fell upon her face and lay for a long
while as if she were death-struck.
The preacher now bethought him of a new course, and after
watching Tituba and Wawpee for several nights, became satisfied
from what he saw, that she was a woman of diabolical power. A part
of what he saw, he was afraid even to speak of; but he declared on
oath before the judges, that he had seen sights, and heard noises
that took away his bodily strength, his hearing and his breath for a
time; that for nearly five weeks no one of her tribe, nor of Wawpee’s
tribe had slept upon his hearth, or eaten of his bread, or lifted the
latch of his door either by night or by day; that notwithstanding this,
the very night before, as he went by the grave-yard where his poor
wife lay, he heard the whispering of a multitude; that having no fear
in such a place, he made a search; and that after a long while he
found his help Tituba concealed in the bushes, that he said nothing
but went his way, satisfied in his own soul however that the voices
he heard were the voices of her tribe; and that after the moon rose
he saw her employed with a great black Shadow on the rock of
death, where as every body knew, sacrifices had been offered up in
other days by another people to the god of the Pagan—the deity of
the savage—employed in a way that made him shiver with fright
where he stood; for between her and the huge black shadow there
lay what he knew to be the dead body of his own dear child
stretched out under the awful trees—her image rather, for she was at
home and abed and asleep at the time. He would have spoken to it if
he could—for he saw what he believed to be the shape of his wife;
he would have screamed for help if he could, but he could not get his
breath, and that was the last he knew; for when he came to himself
he was lying in his own bed, and Tituba was sitting by his side with a
cup of broth in her hand which he took care to throw away the
moment her back was turned; for she was a creature of
extraordinary art, and would have persuaded him that he had never
been out of his bed for the whole day.
The judges immediately issued a warrant for Tituba and Wawpee,
both of whom were hurried off to jail, and after a few days of proper
inquiry, by torture, she was put upon trial for witchcraft. Being sorely
pressed by the word of the preacher and by the testimony of Bridget
Pope and Abigail Paris, who with two more afflicted children (for the
mischief had spread now in every quarter) charged her and Sarah
Good with appearing to them at all hours, and in all places, by day
and by night, when they were awake and when they were asleep,
and with tormenting their flesh. Tituba pleaded guilty and confessed
before the judges and the people that the poor children spoke true,
that she was indeed a witch, and that, with several of her sister
witches of great power—among whom was mother Good, a
miserable woman who lived a great way off, nobody knew where—
and passed the greater part of her time by the sea-side, nobody
knew how, she had been persuaded by the black man to pursue and
worry and vex them. But the words were hardly out of her mouth
before she herself was taken with a fit, which lasted so long that the
judges believed her to be dead. She was lifted up and carried out
into the air; but though she recovered her speech and her strength in
a little time, she was altered in her looks from that day to the day of
her death.
But as to mother Good, when they brought her up for trial, she would
neither confess to the charge nor pray the court for mercy; but she
stood up and mocked the jury and the people, and reproved the
judges for hearkening to a body of accusers who were collected from
all parts of the country, were of all ages, and swore to facts, which if
they ever occurred at all, had occurred years and years before—
facts which it would have been impossible for her to contradict, even
though they had all been, as a large part of them obviously were, the
growth of mistake or of superstitious dread. Her behavior was full of
courage during the trial; and after the trial was over, and up to the
last hour and last breath of her life, it was the same.
You are a liar! said she to a man who called her a witch to her teeth,
and would have persuaded her to confess and live. You are a liar, as
God is my judge, Mike! I am no more a witch than you are a wizard,
and you know it Mike, though you be so glib at prayer; and if you
take away my life, I tell you now that you and yours, and the people
here, and the judges and the elders who are now thirsting for my
blood shall rue the work of this day, forever and ever, in sackcloth
and ashes; and I tell you further as Elizabeth Hutchinson told you,
Ah ha! ... how do you like the sound of that name, Judges? You
begin to be afraid I see; you are all quiet enough now!... But I say to
you nevertheless, and I say to you here, even here, with my last
breath, as Mary Dyer said to you with her last breath, and as poor
Elizabeth Hutchinson said to you with hers, if you take away my life,
the wrath of God shall pursue you!—you and yours!—forever and
ever! Ye are wise men that I see, and mighty in faith, and ye should
be able with such faith to make the deep boil like a pot, as they
swore to you I did, to remove mountains, yea to shake the whole
earth by a word—mighty in faith or how could you have swallowed
the story of that knife-blade, or the story of the sheet? Very wise are
you, and holy and fixed in your faith, or how could you have borne
with the speech of that bold man, who appeared to you in court, and
stood face to face before you, when you believed him to be afar off
or lying at the bottom of the sea, and would not suffer you to take
away the life even of such a poor unhappy old creature as I am,
without reproving you as if he had authority from the Judge of judges
and the King of kings to stay you in your faith!
Poor soul but I do pity thee! whispered a man who stood near with a
coiled rope in one hand and a drawn sword in the other. It was the
high-sheriff.
Her eyes filled and her voice faltered for the first time, when she
heard this, and she put forth her hand with a smile, and assisted him
in preparing the rope, saying as the cart stopped under the large
beam, Poor soul indeed!—You are too soft-hearted for your office,
and of the two, you are more to be pitied than the poor old woman
you are a-going to choke.
Mighty in faith she continued, as the high-sheriff drew forth a watch
and held it up for her to see that she had but a few moments to live. I
address myself to you, ye Judges of Israel! and to you ye teachers of
truth! Believe ye that a mortal woman of my age, with a rope about
her neck, hath power to prophesy? If ye do, give ear to my speech
and remember my words. For death, ye shall have death! For blood,
ye shall have blood—blood on the earth! blood in the sky! blood in
the waters! Ye shall drink blood and breathe blood, you and yours,
for the work of this day!
Woman, woman! we pray thee to forbear! cried a voice from afar off.
I shall not forbear, Cotton Mather—it is your voice that I hear. But for
you and such as you, miserable men that ye are, we should now be
happy and at peace one with another. I shall not forbear—why
should I? What have I done that I may not speak to the few that love
me before we are parted by death?
Be prepared woman—if you will die, for the clock is about to strike
said another voice.
Be prepared, sayest thou? William Phips, for I know the sound of thy
voice too, thou hard-hearted miserable man! Be prepared, sayest
thou? Behold——stretching forth her arms to the sky, and lifting
herself up and speaking so that she was heard of the people on the
house-tops afar off, Lo! I am ready! Be ye also ready, for now!—now!
—even while I speak to you, he is preparing to reward both my
accusers and my judges——.
He!—who!
Who, brother Joseph? said somebody in the crowd.
Why the Father of lies to be sure! what a question for you to ask,
after having been of the jury!
Thou scoffer!—
Paul! Paul, beware!—
Hark—what’s that! Lord have mercy upon us!
The Lord have mercy upon us! cried the people, giving way on every
side, without knowing why, and looking toward the high-sea, and
holding their breath.
Pho, pho, said the scoffer, a grey-haired man who stood leaning over
his crutch with eyes full of pity and sorrow, pho, pho, the noise that
you hear is only the noise of the tide.
Nay, nay, Elder Smith, nay, nay, said an associate of the speaker. If it
is only the noise of the tide, why have we not heard it before? and
why do we not hear it now? just now, when the witch is about to be—
True ... true ... it may not be the Evil one, after all.
The Evil one, Joe Libby! No, no! it is God himself, our Father above!
cried the witch, with a loud voice, waving her arms upward, and
fixing her eye upon a group of two or three individuals who stood
aloof, decorated with the badges of authority. Our Father above, I
say! The Governor of governors, and the Judge of judges!... The cart
began to move here.... He will reward you for the work of this day!
He will refresh you with blood for it! and you too Jerry Pope, and you
too Micajah Noyes, and you too Job Smith, and you ... and you ...
and you....
Yea of a truth! cried a woman who stood apart from the people with
her hands locked and her eyes fixed upon the chief-judge. It was
Rachel Dyer, the grandchild of Mary Dyer. Yea of a truth! for the Lord
will not hold him guiltless that spilleth his brother’s blood, or taketh
his sister’s life by the law—and her speech was followed by a shriek
from every hill-top and every house-top, and from every tree and
every rock within sight of the place, and the cart moved away, and
the body of the poor old creature swung to and fro in the convulsions
of death.
 CHAPTER V.
It is not a little remarkable that within a few days after the death of
Sarah Good, a part of her pretended prophecy, that which was
directed by her to the man who called her a witch at the place of
death, was verified upon him, letter by letter, as it were.
He was way-laid by a party of the Mohawks, and carried off to
answer to the tribe for having reported of them that they ate the flesh
of their captives.—It would appear that he had lived among them in
his youth, and that he was perfectly acquainted with their habits and
opinions and with their mode of warfare; that he had been well
treated by their chief, who let him go free at a time when he might
lawfully have been put to death, according to the usages of the tribe,
and that he could not possibly be mistaken about their eating the
flesh of their prisoners. It would appear too, that he had been
watched for, a long while before he was carried off; that his path had
been beset hour after hour, and week after week, by three young
warriors of the tribe, who might have shot him down, over and over
again if they would, on the step of his own door, in the heart of a
populous village, but they would not; for they had sworn to trap their
prey alive, and to bring it off with the hide and the hair on; that after
they had carried him to the territory of the Mohawks, they put him on
trial for the charge face to face with a red accuser; that they found
him guilty, and that, with a bitter laugh, they ordered him to eat of the
flesh of a dead man that lay bleeding on the earth before him; that
he looked up and saw the old chief who had been his father when he
belonged to the tribe, and that hoping to appease the haughty
savage, he took some of the detestable food into his mouth, and that
instantly—instantly—before he could utter a prayer, they fell upon
him with clubs and beat him to death.
Her prophecy therefore did appear to the people to be accomplished;
for had she not said to this very man, that for the work of that day,
“He should breathe blood and eat blood?”
Before a week had passed over, the story of death, and the speech
of the prophetess took a new shape, and a variety of circumstances
which occurred at the trial, and which were disregarded at the time,
were now thought of by the very judges of the land with a secret
awe; circumstances that are now to be detailed, for they were the
true cause of what will not be forgotten for ages in that part of the
world ... the catastrophe of our story.
At the trial of Sarah Good, while her face was turned away from her
accuser, one of the afflicted gave a loud scream, and gasping for
breath, fell upon the floor at the feet of the judges, and lay there as if
she had been struck down by the weight of no mortal arm; and being
lifted up, she swore that she had been stabbed with a knife by the
shape of Sarah Good, while Sarah Good herself was pretending to
be at prayer on the other side of the house; and for proof, she put
her hand into her bosom and drew forth the blade of a penknife
which was bloody, and which upon her oath, she declared to have
been left sticking in her flesh a moment before, by the shape of
Sarah Good.
The Judges were thunderstruck. The people were mute with terror,
and the wretched woman herself covered her face with her hands;
for she knew that if she looked upon the sufferers, they would shriek
out, and foam at the mouth, and go into fits, and lie as if they were
dead for a while; and that she would be commanded by the judges to
go up to them and lay her hands upon their bodies without speaking
or looking at them, and that on her doing so, they would be sure to
revive, and start up, and speak of what they had seen or suffered
while they were in what they called their agony.
The jury were already on their way out for consultation—they could
not agree, it appeared; but when they saw this, they stopped at the
door, and came back one by one to the jury box, and stood looking
at each other, and at the judges, and at the poor old woman, as if
they no longer thought it necessary to withdraw even for form sake,
afraid as they all were of doing that, in a case of life and death, for
which they might one day or other be sorry. A shadow was upon
every visage of the twelve—the shadow of death; a look in the eyes
of everybody there, a gravity and a paleness, which when the poor
prisoner saw, she started up with a low cry—a cry of reproach—a cry
of despair—and stood with her hands locked, and her mouth
quivering, and her lips apart before God—lips white with fear, though
not with the fear of death; and looked about her on every side, as if
she had no longer a hope left—no hope from the jury, no hope from
the multitude; nay as if while she had no longer a hope, she had no
longer a desire to live.
There was a dead preternatural quiet in the house—not a breath
could be heard now, not a breath nor a murmur; and lo! the aged
foreman of the jury stood forth and laid his hands upon the Book of
the Law, and lifted up his eyes and prepared to utter the verdict of
death; but before he could speak so as to be heard, for his heart was
over-charged with sorrow, a tumult arose afar off like the noise of the
wind in the great woods of America; or a heavy swell on the sea-
shore, when a surge after surge rolls booming in from the secret
reservoir of waters, like the tide of a new deluge. Voices drew near
with a portentous hoof-clatter from every side—east, west, north and
south, so that the people were mute with awe; and as the dread
clamor approached and grew louder and louder every moment, they
crowded together and held their breath, they and the judges and the
preachers and the magistrates, every man persuaded in his own
soul that a rescue was nigh. At last a smothered war-whoop was
heard, and then a sweet cheerful noise like the laugh of a young
child high up in the air—and then a few words in the accent of
authority, and a bustle outside of the door, which gave way as if it
were spurned with a powerful foot; and a stranger appeared in the
shadow of the huge trees that over-hung the door-way like a summer
cloud—a low, square-built swarthy man with a heavy tread, and a
bright fierce look, tearing his way through the crowd like a giant of
old, and leading a beautiful boy by the hand.
What, ho! cried he to the chief judge, walking up to him, and
standing before him, and speaking to him with a loud clear voice.
What ho! captain Robert Sewall! why do ye this thing? What ho,
there! addressing himself to the foreman of the jury—why speed ye
so to the work of death? and you, master Bailey! and you governor
Phips! and you doctor Mather, what business have ye here? And you
ye judges, who are about to become the judges of life and death,
how dare ye! Who gave you power to measure and weigh such
mystery? Are ye gifted men—all of you—every man of you—
specially gifted from above? Are you Thomas Fisk—with your white
hair blowing about your agitated mouth and your dim eyes, are you
able to see your way clear, that you have the courage to pronounce
a verdict of death on your aged sister who stands there! And you
Josh Carter, senior! and you major Zach Trip! and you Job
Saltonstall! Who are ye and what are ye, men of war, that ye are
able to see spirits, or that ye should become what ye are—the
judges of our afflicted people! And who are we, and what were our
fathers, I beseech you, that we should be base enough to abide
upon earth but by your leave!
The judges looked at each other in consternation.
Who is it! ... who is it! cried the people as they rushed forward and
gathered about him and tried to get a sight of his face. Who can it
be!
Burroughs—Bur—Bur—Burroughs, I do believe! whispered a man
who stood at his elbow, but he spoke as if he did not feel very sure of
what he said.
Not George Burroughs, hey?
I’d take my oath of it neighbour Joe, my Bible-oath of it, leaning
forward as far as he could reach with safety, and shading his eyes
with his large bony hand—
Well, I do say! whispered another.
I see the scar!—as I live, I do! cried another, peering over the heads
of the multitude, as they rocked to the heavy pressure of the intruder.
But how altered he is! ... and how old he looks!...—and shorter than
ever! muttered several more.
Silence there! cried the chief judge—a militia-captain, it is to be
observed, and of course not altogether so lawyer-like as a judge of
our day would be.
Silence there! echoed the High Sheriff.
Never see nobody so altered afore, continued one of the crowd, with
his eye fixed on the judge—I will say that much, afore I stop, Mr.
Sheriff Berry, an’ (dropping his voice) if you don’t like it, you may
lump it ... who cares for you?
Well—an’ who cares for you, if you come to that.
Officer of the court, how now! cried the chief judge in a very loud
sharp voice.
Here I be mister judge—I ain’t deef.
Take that man away.
I say ... you! cried the High-Sheriff, getting up and fetching the man a
rap over the head with his white-oak staff ... do you hear that?
Hear what?
What Mr. judge Sewall says.
I don’t care for Mr. judge Sewall, nor you nyther.
Away with him Sir! out with him! are we to suffer this outrage on the
dignity of the court ... in the House of the Lord—away with him, Sir.
Here’s the devil to pay and no pitch hot—whispered a sailor-looking
fellow, in a red baize shirt.
An’ there’s thirteen-pence for you to pay, Mr. Outlandishman, said a
little neighbour, whose duty it was to watch for offenders in a small
way, and fine them for swearing, drinking, or kissing their wives on
the sabbath day.
What for?
Why, for that air oath o’yourn.
What oath?
Why, you said here’s the devil to pay!
Ha—ha—ha—and there’s thirteen-pence for you to pay.
You be darned!
An’ there’s thirteen-pence more for you, my lad—ha—ha—ha—