Impressions of Loss: Writing and Memory in Biographies of Seal Carvers

This essay reconsiders the literary significance of Zhou Lianggong’s 周亮工 (1612–1672) Yinren zhuan 印人傳 (Biographies of Seal Carvers; 1673), not as an anthology of “biographies” but as a sophisticated effort to use seals as conceptual tools with which to investigate the relationship between writing and memory. Zhou’s vignettes are structured around encounters with, and embodied acts of, making seal impressions, procedures that prompt reflection on the storage, transmission, and interpretation of memory more broadly. Early-Qing literary meditations on the vagaries of remembrance, Zhou’s prose suggests, might be construed not simply as responses to traumatic experiences stemming from the dynastic transition, but as increasingly self-conscious reflections on how the tools and media of writing convey and counteract a vanishing past.