Manipulated Texts
Junk

Texts can be stuck together, yielding a Juxtaposed result. But mere junk can also accumulate, especially at the end of a text: extraneous matter that represents bad housekeeping at the text proprietor's headquarters. The material may be have some relation to the text proper, but it is not really part of it.

Chinese Examples

Analects 16-20. These chapters as a group are characterized by extraneous matter at the ends of some of them; see particularly the lists of names at the end of Analects 18. This is one of a set of traits which, as Tswei Shu was the first to notice, mark off Analects 16-20 from the rest of the text. It was only later discovered that these chapters are, in effect, the 03rd century portion of the Analects. It is possible that demoralization stemming from the reduced influence of the Lu Confucian school at this time was one factor in the seemingly below standard housekeeping of its headquarters crew.

Other Examples

Rg Veda 126. The concluding stanzas 6 and 7 of this piece "have no apparent connexion with what precedes, and are in a different metre. They seem to be a fragment of a popular song" (Griffith 87, compare 652). So fervent is the song fragment that Griffith, working in 1889, can translate it only into Latin. It is presumably just something that got onto the editor's desk. (That it turned up in the course of oral recitation is unlikely, claims for Rg Veda orality at all stages notwithstanding). The case is thus not one of Juxtaposition; compare Shr 220.

Mediaeval European scribes, mindful of the cost of their writing medium, would sometimes fill up unused portions of a piece of parchment by writing in something completely unrelated. It is to this untidy sort of frugality that we owe the preservation of much of the secular verse of the period.

 

Philology is Copyright © 2001- by E Bruce Brooks

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