#first of all episode 8 forest scene
The Swift Moving Steps as a Motif of Recognition
Okay, the forest scene. All of us hanwenzhou veterans have screamed about it more than once, but for my part I’ve been a little too preoccupied with the usual suspects (i.e.: the bow and bow-lift, and Wen Kexing’s hand around Han Ying’s throat), so today I’d like to talk about a couple of other things, focusing more on the early parts of the scene, particularly Han Ying’s instant recognition of Zhou Zishu.
Now, from an audience perspective it’s not really a surprise – we can all agree that Zhou Zishu and Wen Kexing’s disguises in this scene are, shall we say, transparent. But what I find is significant is that Han Ying is explicitly shown to recognize Zhou Zishu because of him using the Swift Moving Steps. That would be interesting on its own account, and it is doubly so if we consider the fact that Zhou Zishu was recognized by Wen Kexing in the exact same way.
Recognition or anagnorisis as a literary device was first defined by Aristotle in his Poetics. Aristotlean anagnorisis is a crucial element of (Ancient Greek) tragedy, although it can occur in comedy and epos as well. Of course, it has been largely employed outside of classical drama, with many modern examples.
But what does anagnorisis mean?
