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In this new reading, the famous Tang tale "Nanke taishou zhuan" is shown to focus on the nature of reality through the complex interconnection of a non-human world with both a dreamscape and the realm of the dead. The protagonist's experience in an anthill turns out to have been nothing "but a dream" but at the same time tangibly real.
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In the Tang tale best known as "Nanke taishou zhuan" ... (The Biography of the Governor of Southern Branch),1 by Li Gongzuo ... (c. 770-c. 848), the protagonist, Chunyu Fen ... in a drunken dream enters a parallel world of anthropomorphized ants and lives an entire lifetime within a huai tree. Upon his exit from this extraordinary experience, he discovers that no time has elapsed in the real world. He realizes that his otherworldly lifetime has been nothing but a dream, but that it has been, at the same time, tangibly real.
This tale has been viewed as a dream tale about transience and the nature of reality, an adventure tale involving cross-species marriage, and as a satire on the antlike scurrying of Tang courtly life. Its subtle exploration of death, and of the importance of learning something from dying and being reborn, however, has been ignored. The tale does deeply explore the meaning of reality and the illusory nature of time itself, but it also paints a vivid picture of the relation between the two Other realms of the dead and that of insects. This relation is crucial to understanding one of the deepest layers of the story, which involves reconciliation and reestablishment of order between a dead father and a living son. The motivating force behind Chunyu's entire transformative adventure, in fact, seems to be his deceased father. Neatly parallel to this initiative by a dead man to instigate change in his scalawag son is the fact that the story is later said to have been told to the narrator by the protagonist five years after he died. The unlikely date of Chunyu's transmission to the narrator was traditionally not commented upon, but several 20th century scholars take it as a mistake by the story's author or a later editor. When read as if an intended...