Abstract des Vortrags

Awaiting The Sages of a Future Generation: Is there a "Rhetoric of Treason" in the Shiji?

In several parts of the Shiji, the historiographer in his personal comments addresses the sages of a future generation and encourages them to ponder deeply over what he has discussed in the text and to draw their conclusions from it. As I have argued in my paper, all the chapters in which this address to later junzi occurs are key chapters in so far as they reveal to an attentive reader that in the historiographer’s view the Han dynasty had not encountered a wise ruler yet and that he therefore directed all his hope toward a hopefully better time in the future. By reading those passages in which this address to future sages occurs, a reader trained in the exegetical traditions related to the Chunqiu will readily be alerted that they allude to one passage in the Gongyang zhuan. In the very last sentence of that text, the author of the Gongyang zhuan addresses sages of a future generation for whom Confucius had transmitted the moral rules established in the Chunqiu text, and he points out that this was also something which he took his delight in. The Shiji author thus by making use of the rhetorical tool of allusion in his text conveys to his reader a political message by which he doubtless incurred the risk of being reproached with having committed "high treason" against his own emperor, Emperor Wu of the Han, even though the historiographer himself would probably have claimed to have been motivated primarily by his being uncompromisingly obliged to record the "truth".