5p.Qian,Part 1,Spirit and Self - ScholarSpace

Character Appraisal 25
discursive properties of this speech act. 21 What kind of speech act does
character appraisal entail? What features constitute its discursive properties?
How do they join together to form a discourse? Consider for example
a relatively “original” historical account of character appraisal that is
not yet codified into a character-writing episode. It is quoted by Liu Chün
from Sun Sheng’s (ca. 302–373) Tsa-yü (Miscellaneous accounts), compiled
at least a half century earlier than the Shih-shuo: “Ts’ao Ts’ao once
asked Hsü Shao, ‘What sort of person am I?’After he had asked insistently,
Shao finally answered: ‘An able minister in an age of order, and a treacherous
warrior in an age of disorder.’ Ts’ao Ts’ao laughed aloud.” 22
This episode presents a character appraisal in two parts: its text and
context. The text consists of Hsü Shao’s characterization of Ts’ao Ts’ao,
evaluating his ability and moral qualities in two opposite political contexts,
an age of order and an age of disorder. This feature establishes character
appraisal as an evaluator’s comment on an evaluatee’s inner qualities in response
to the outer world. The context consists of the relationship between
the evaluator and the evaluatee and their relationship with the text. In this
case, a tension exists clearly between the evaluator and the evaluatee: Hsü
Shao hesitates to respond to Ts’ao Ts’ao’s insistent request, finally giving
Ts’ao a dichotomistic evaluation—one complementary and the other pejorative;
Ts’ao at any rate accepts this contentious comment with obvious
pleasure. The tension reflects the two participants’ different standards and
purposes, rooted in their respective social, political, cultural, and/or ethical
backgrounds.
The practice of character appraisal spanned a historical period of about
350 years, from the Late Han to the end of the Eastern Chin (approximately
a.d. 76–420). A close examination of its historical evolution and
its interactions with other intellectual or cultural influences will expose
how character appraisal eventually led to the formation of the Shih-shuo
t’i. In what follows, I shall divide this historical period into several chronological
sections, reconstruct the character appraisal practices of each section
via relevant historical records and studies, and then compare these
changes with the Shih-shuo hsin-yü accounts. I will review this evolving