The Inscription of Remnant Things: Zhang Dai’s “Twenty-Eight Friends”

The existential dilemma of whether or not to live under a new dynasty, coupled with political restrictions on what human voices might say, inspired nuanced forms of identification with the properties of inanimate objects in early Qing literature. 1 Things (wu) helped poets articulate feelings of redundancy or recalcitrance, while in certain cases registering palpable fears of depersonalization. 2 Historian and renowned prose stylist Zhang Dai (1597-?1684) went further than other seventeenth-century authors in casting "objects of the former dynasty" (qianchao yiwu) as protagonists in his responses to the transition. 3 In an extensive, yet neglected collection of inscriptions (ming) on his family's possessions, Zhang conceived of things as faithful interlocutors, asking what lessons his appointed "friends" (you) might impart amid the turbulence of the Ming cataclysm. This unique sequence invites its readers to reflect on how to represent historical trauma not from an anthropocentric viewpoint, but by attending to the experiences of household things. * I am grateful to Steven Miles and the two reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.