Assignment:
Space, landscape, travel. The space of transcendents as represented in transcendent traditions, or of the "rivers and lakes" in "martial arts" traditions, is often represented as invisibly (except for insiders) overlapping with the world as experienced by ordinary mortals. One set of questions relates to the kinds of travel that make it possible for someone to pass from the ordinary world of mortal humans into the world of transcendents (or of jianghu heroes). The representation of travel in space in the Shuihu zhuan alternates between purely formulaic and elliptical handling (as in "when they were hungry they ate, and when they were thirsty they drank," etc., to pass over a multi -day journey) to very heightened scene descriptions, particularly in the lead in to a major incident.