The Grand Canal and Text-Voice Resonance: The Synchronic and Diachronic Construction of an Emotional Community in the “Zuili” Cultural Sphere of Jiashan

This paper proposes “Text-Voice Resonance” (wensheng gongzhen) as an analytical concept describing the cycle by which an affective utterance passes repeatedly between written and oral form and enlarges its body of respondents, and uses it to examine how the “Zuili” cultural sphere of Jiashan was linked to the affective network along the Grand Canal. The synchronic axis addresses the structural homology of affect across places, examining how bereft ministers, aggrieved women, palace attendants and travellers stationed along the canal-and-post-road corridor drew on a shared vocabulary of dispersion, and how Zuili entered that structure through the anthologizing work of the Zuili shixi. The diachronic axis addresses transmission and reception, taking the chain that carried the Kuaiji woman’s wall poem at Xinjia Station from ink on plaster to a literati manuscript, to re-inked plaster, to a post-clerk’s recitation, and finally to a printed shihua, as evidence of how a text survives the lapse of communicative memory, and showing that what joins Wu Zhen’s reclusion, Yuan Liaofan’s morality books, the melancholy of the Liuzhou ci school, and the performance of baojuan and field songs is the long resonance of the paired vocabulary of goodness and reclusion. The paper argues for a holistic conception of local cultural heritage that integrates written and oral transmission.