Manipulated Texts
Juxtaposed

Texts of this type are made by combining two or more previously existing texts, end to end. They differ from Conflated Texts in that the source materials are not redistributed; rather, their consecutive integrity, if not always their identity, is preserved. There are cases where the motive of juxtaposition is not to present the two in a new philosophical or literary light, but simply to use up free space at the end of a piece of writing material. These are instances of random rather than constitutive juxtapositions, and they are only rarely mistaken for single texts by later readers.

Juxtaposition is nearly always editorial, and does not retrospectively affect the nature of the constituent texts on which it operates.

Chinese Examples

Shr 220 now consists of several stanzas depicting a tasteful banquet scene, followed by several more in which banquet guests become drunk and disorderly. Kennedy has convincingly proposed that the two segments were originally separate poems, later juxtaposed as one. The present author has further shown that the motive for the juxtaposition was to make room for a later added poem, without changing the total number of poems in the collection. The fact that the addition took place when the total size of the Shr collection had been fixed, and thus exerted an inhibiting effect on new material, itself dates the addition (our Shr 219) as very late within the collection. Many such local determinations of relative age eventually produce a relative chronology for much of the contents of the Shr, an effort which is currently proceeding under the auspices of the Project.

Tai Yi Shvng Shwei. Donald Harper has analyzed this Gwodyen work as consisting of two segments: Tai Yi (strips 1-8) and Tyen Dau (strips 9-14). One possibility (see under Layered) is that both were pre-existing material, brought together by the c0290 compiler. The second (or Tyen Dau) text begins on its own strip of bamboo, and so far as can be told (the preceding strip is broken), the two parts are contiguous but distinct. See also next:

DDJ/Tai Yi. The third of the three bamboo-slip Gwodyen Dau/Dv Jing florilegia is bound together with the Tai Yi Shvng Shwei text, itself already composite (see previous entry). The DDJ "C" text is not physically blended with the Tai Yi; it begins on a separate strip of bamboo. The two together thus constitute a higher level Juxtaposed text.

Gwandz 4. This chapter of our present Gwandz consists of eight separately titled sections, which on internal evidence cannot all be of the same date. One of them (the seventh, Jyou Bai "The Nine Roads To Defeat") was regarded as a separate entity by the Gwandz enterprise itself, as is shown by the fact that this piece, and nothing else in GZ 4, has a separate commentary, the Jyou Bai Jye (GZ 65). The probability is that Lyou Syang, in editing the disordered mass of Gwandz writings in the Han Palace Library at the end of the 01c, combined this and the other seven pieces as thematically consistent, or at minimum as having no more consistent point of attachment in the text, given that he was committed to a chapter-length rather than a paragraph-length module for the Gwandz.

The investigator is warned, in this as in all cases of Juxtaposition, that no one date can be assigned to the diverse components of GZ 4, which for philological purposes must be treated separately, and that no original philosophical unity necessarily connects them.

Mencius. At some point, perhaps in early Han, the house texts of the two separate and parallel post-Mencian schools (comprising MC 1-3 and 4-7) were put together into a single "Mencius" compilation; this later editorial stage is thus a Juxtaposition. That fact has no bearing on the nature of the two segments combined, both of which happen to be Accretional.

DDJ/Hwang-di Sz-shu. At the beginning of the silk scroll which contains the later of the two Mawangdwei copies of the Dau/Dv Jing are four separately named texts: Jing-fa, Jing, Chvng, and Dau Ywaen. Only the Jing text actually mentions Hwang-di (the "Yellow Emperor"), but the conjunction of all four with the DDJ in this set of texts has been thought to represent the Hwang/Lau political Dauism of early Han. It will be noted (compare above) that the DDJ has a particular propensity for being juxtaposed with other texts in this way.

Other Examples

Brhad Aranyaka. This is agreed to be the earliest of the series of Upanishads. It exists not in one but in three versions, which in the received text have been placed side by side, rather than conflated. Each occupies 2 of the 6 chapters of the received text, and each has its own variant of a transmission genealogy. The second of the juxtaposed texts contains socially later material than the first, and the third is widely regarded as supplementary to both. That is, the constituents were juxtaposed in order of decreasing age. Together, they should document stages in the growth of doctrine, a possibility which has not so far been extensively investigated.

Leopold Godowsky, piano technician extraordinaire, demonstrated that it is possible to run Chopin's "Black Key" and "Butterfly" Etudes at the same time, superimposed, from one pair of hands. The result he entitled "Badinage." It is either delicious or detestable, depending upon taste. Typologically, it defines the vertical equivalent of the laterally juxtaposed text.

 

Philology is Copyright © 2001- by E Bruce Brooks

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