The accounts by Bada Shanren's contemporaries of the deranged or "mad" behavior that he exhibited in the later part of his life are well known, and some attempts have been made by more recent writers to distinguish what seems to have been real madness in it from the pretended. On the one hand, the circumstances of his life, beginning with the fall of the Ming imperial house from which he was descended and the death of his father when Bada was only nineteen, were ample causes for the emotional instability and sometimes derangement of his later years. His wild and irrational actions, his dumbness, his loud shouts, laughter, and weeping, all fit recognized patterns of insane behavior, Chinese or Western. On the other hand, pretending or enacting madness as a desperate expedient for placing oneself outside normal expectations of engagement with society, or to escape suspicion of involvement in anti-government activity or even of expressing loyalist sentiments, was a long-established practice in China, for which many noted men, artists among them, could serve as models. Li Dan has argued that Bada's first recorded violent outbreak of madness, at the end of his year-long stay with the prefect of Linchuan Hu Yitang, was a way of escaping from Hu's "incarceration." According to this theory, Hu meant to force Bada to submit himself to the Boxue Hongci examination of 1679, which was intended to draw Chinese educated men into the Manchu administration and put an end to their Ming-loyalist posture. Bada's madness, then, would have been a strategem for avoiding the examination without suffering retaliation. Other recent writers have suggested that Bada, as a descendent of the Ming imperial family, might have been approached by agents of Wu Sangui, whose anti-Manchu forces controlled in this period much of south China including southern Jiangxi, and that Bada's pretending of madness was to escape being implicated in Wu's doomed rebellion.2 Wu Tung, on the other hand, argues that Bada's outbreak of madness in 1680 was unrelated to his stay with Hu Yitang. In Wu's view, it was the outcome of a personal crisis over his decision to leave the Buddhist order and return to secular life, re-assuming and proclaiming his status as a scion of the Ming imperial house, with all the attendant alienation and risks that this change imposed on him.
Whichever of these versions we follow--and it is not my intention here to contribute in any way to this controversy--we can note that Bada's contemporaries also suspected some pretending of madness. Hu Yitang's son-in-law Qiu Lien wrote in 1679: "I have heard that Xuege [i.e. Bada] became mentally disordered and returned to Fengxin. I suspect that it was under some pretext." And Chen Ding writes that Bada became dumb after the Manchu conquest of 1644 "following his father's intention"--a renunciation of speech, these words suggest, more motivated by filial devotion and anti-Qing outrage than forced on him by mental illness.
Assumptions of this kind, in any case, can explain only a part of Bada's derangement, which was too severe and lasting to be dismissed entirely as "theatrical madness." The enactment of madness, moreover, could surely have aggravated whatever instability afflicted him already; as writers on Hamlet have pointed out, prolonged pretending of madness is in effect being mad. We must regard Bada's madness, then, as a dense, ultimately inextricable tangle of willed and unwilled, external and internal factors. Even so, and without attempting to disentangle these factors or even assuming that they were somehow distinct in Bada's psyche, we could analyze the traits of behavior that people of his time took to be symptoms of madness, considering these in the context of normal vs. aberrant social practice in China.
Similarly, although we cannot understand the strange and enigmatic qualities of his poetry, calligraphy, and painting simply as symptoms of pathological states of mind, we should be able to identify and analyze elements in his works that induced his audiences to read them that way. Shao Changheng, who records movingly his visit to Bada around 1688, intersperses descriptions of his fits of madness with characterizations of his literary and artistic productions: his calligraphy in the "wild draft" (kuang-cao) script was "exceedingly remarkable and strange"; his painting "did not recognize the limits and rules of other painters"; and his poetry was "interspersed with obscure incomprehensible turns of phrase" which Shao "could not fully decipher." Without specifying the relationship, Shao clearly intends that his readers should link the oddness and obscurity of the works with the craziness of the man. Modern writers imply the same connection, while also avoiding the problem of what kind of connection it was. The question, however, needs to be raised: what in fact constitutes the "madness" in Bada's poetry, calligraphy, and painting? This paper will attempt to answer that question, although only for his painting.
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