Illuminating Obscurity: The Youming Lu and the Optical Dynamic in Early Medieval Chinese Gothic

Abstract

This article reads the Youming lu ( Records of the Hidden and Visible Realms) as an epitome of the central tension in the tradition of ‘anomaly accounts’ ( zhiguai) between a desire for order and an openness to uncertainties. By conceptualizing the zhiguai as ‘early medieval Chinese Gothic’, this article attempts to disclose the contemporary significance of a premodern non-Anglo-European genre, as well as unbind the Gothic from cultural or socio-historical determinism. It attends to an ambivalent solicitude for the obscure embedded in the Youming lu’s iconic dynamic of light and darkness to theorize such epistemic hospitality into an alternative enlightenment also crucial to the Gothic. Shifting the focus of globalgothic from ontology to epistemology, from the clearly marvelous to the interplay of clarity and obscurity, this article seeks to open up an intermediate space between cultural colonialism and esotericism, where the zhiguai, as ‘strange non-fiction’, can be considered to have prefigured a gothic sensitivity that in turn illuminates its own fictional potential which predated classical Chinese fiction proper.