Written in the Margins: Reading into Texts

Abstract

This chapter continues the process of examining hand-written chaoben from various points of view. A number of the titles introduced in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 are again brought up for examination and several newly introduced chaoben are added to the discussion. The goal of this particular chapter is to allow us to read meaning into the “extraneous” or “random” materials we find in chaoben. At first glance, we have seen that the chaoben usually consist of several texts within the same booklet that deal with various subjects. In addition, as illustrated in Chapter 2, comments, observations, and selfpromotion are often written in the margins. Not infrequently, short poems expose some of the attitudes and values of the author or copyist of the booklet. With some regularity we find that the copyist wrote a poem or two of his own creation at the conclusion to his copied text. We can also judge the writing and from it draw conclusions about the degree of formal schooling the copyist received by evaluating not only the quality of calligraphy but the content of the poems or random comments that might have been added in the margins of the copied text. All these observations help us to draw meaning from the booklets that go beyond the surfacemeaning of themain textual content. Thus far we have seen that the handwritten chaoben were prepared as reference materials for the professional and personal lives of their author. In the “professional” portions, the author wrote down information that would help him to earn a living. This aspect of the texts had an economic function, in that they were used to help the owner earn a living by allowing him to refer to the information he had copied out. At the same time, the men who copied out these texts often treated them as notebooks, in which all sorts of information theholder considered relevant could bewrittendown. In some cases, it appears the copyist earned money from one occupation, perhaps medicine as in the case of Dr. He in the chaoben Internal and External Medical Complaints [Neiwaike yanke zazheng內外科眼科雜症].1 discussed below, but was equally