Organizer: Stephen Roddy, University of San Francisco
Chair: Timothy C. Wong, Arizona State University
Discussant: Maram Epstein, University of Oregon
Western scholarship in the field of Chinese vernacular fiction (baihua xiaoshuo) has largely accepted at face value the traditional Confucian condemnation of and disdain for the genre. Indeed, by demonstrating the significance of fiction within literary and intellectual life of late imperial times, the work of Andrew Plaks, Robert Hegel, and many other scholars can be seen as attempts to redress the often unrelenting denigration of the genre. While valuable, such studies may also have inadvertently led to certain misconceptions regarding the reception of, and expectations for, fiction by their reading public(s). In particular, the generic character of fiction as a source of "entertainment" appears in need of greater clarification. This panel attempts to draw attention to these issues as they affect the interpretation of several works of Qing and early Republican-era xiaoshuo .
These four papers span a broad spectrum of opinion with regard to the issues in question. Peter Rushton and Timothy Wong both seek to revise recent interpretations of xiaoshuo that have foregrounded certain elements amenable to feminist or other largely western-inspired analytical frameworks. On the other hand, both Martin Huang and Stephen Roddy find in works of the mid-Qing period the reflection of discourses of moral inculcation, clan building, literati self-renewal and textual research current during that era. Should we proceed cautiously in our evaluation of the subversive potential of the shrews so populous in works of the late-Ming and Qing periods? Can a mid-Qing xiaoshuo be read as a companion volume of sorts to the staid "household instructions" (jiaxun, a genre that universally condemned fiction as corrupting of youth) composed by its author and appended to manuscripts of the text? Did mid- to late-Qing writers of literati fiction adapt less sophisticated materials through ironic distancing, as the great Ming masterworks are alleged to have done? And, has our understanding of the works of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly School of the early twentieth century still failed to fully account for their indebtedness to traditional fiction of earlier periods? By reconstructing the social, literary, and other cultural parameters operative during these respective periods, we hope to contribute to a more nuanced, if not necessarily wholly unified, understanding of xiaoshuo through time.
The Xiaoshuo Tradition and Modern Entertainment Fiction
Timothy C. Wong, Arizona State University
Western concepts have so dominated modern perceptions of traditional xiaoshuo that the genre has never taken on an identity of its own. Since at least the 1820s, xiaoshuo has been equated with the Western novel, and hence expected to either explore or disseminate truth. Its lowly position in its native literary hierarchy was simply attributed to elitist Confucianism which ruled the literary scene. Yet we know that Confucians have been responsible for writing, editing, and-importantly-financing xiaoshuo texts. If they did not give xiaoshuo sufficient respect, they were nevertheless fond of it.
The expectation of truth leads modern critics to home in on a minuscule fraction of extant xiaoshuo texts, generally the six long works considered "classic" and a few short stories which appear to fit the truth-seeking criterion. The bulk of the tradition has been consigned to the "chapbook" category-or to oblivion. In spite of this, the vitality of old-style xiaoshuo, loved for its entertainment value, became evident in the proliferation of the so-called "Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly" or "Saturday School" fiction in Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin during the teens and twenties-at a time when "modern" Chinese fiction took on moral and political burdens, and achieved respect. Precisely because "Butterfly" fiction starts out to provide, as xiaoshuo has for centuries, casual diversion "between tea and meals," studying it can lead us to a more accurate delineation of traditional xiaoshuo 's generic characteristics.
The Xingshi yinguan zhuan on its Own Terms: Disappointment and Disjunction for
Readers Past and Present
Peter H. Rushton, University of California, Santa Cruz
The Xingshi yinyuan zhuan (Marriage Affinity to Awaken an Age) is the literary abode of one of traditional China's most infamous shrews, Xue Sujiu. The unrelenting Chinese treatment of this topic and its inherent complexity, combined with our modern sensitivity to feminist issues, makes our approach to this work anything but unproblematic. In this essay, I attempt to re-contextualize the novel to reveal the internal rhetorical logic of the portrayal of Xue Sujie, while suspending my modern concerns, to the degree possible, before reaching any critical conclusions.
Considered in this light, as a meditation on the phenomenon of shrewish women, the novel is a disappointment for both modern and traditional readers. Both those who would delight in condemnation of Sujie as an unrepentant shrew, and those who might sympathize with her as a prototypical feminist rebel, will be frustrated by my reading. This is due to the fact that the prerequisite for either praise or blame of Xue Sujie, is the establishment of her status as an independent moral agent. Since she is denied this status, she ultimately cannot be held responsible for her actions. Consequently, her overall significance is greatly diminished, in spite of her central position in the novel. The novelist's portrayal of Xue Sujie chose entertainment over enlightenment, by being more devoted to a display of the pyrotechnics of shrewishness, than an exploration of its psychological and sociological chemistries. At the same time, this portrayal of Xue Sujie alerts us, by negative example, to the key achievement of a host of other Chinese authors of traditional fiction and drama, which lies precisely in their ability to present us with complex female characters in full possession of their moral autonomy.
Xiaoshuo as Jiaxun (Household Instructions): The Pedagogy of the
Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction Qilu deng
Martin Huang, University of California, Irvine
The eighteenth-century vernacular xiaoshuo Qilu deng ( Warning Lights at the Crossroads) was mainly circulated in manuscript form until this century. Many of its manuscript versions had the author's "Jiaxun zhunyan" ("Earnest Words of Household Instructions") attached. As one commentator wrote, the "Household Instructions" placed before the xiaoshuo proper was meant to serve as a reading guide for the reader. The author/narrator even directly compares his xiaoshuo to a "Manual for Family Governing" at one point in the xiaoshuo. Jiaxun was a very popular phenomenon in late imperial China. Although for many people of that time a work of xiaoshuo had to be didactic (a Ming writer classified certain morality books under the rubric of xiaoshuo), claiming a xiaoshuo was a fictionalized version of jiaxun was rather unprecedented. Qilu deng is pedagogical in the sense that it is meant to be an educational reading experience for its reader. The paper tries to explore how particular jiaxun ideology informs the xiaoshuo and controls the reader's interpretations. A main goal of this paper is to see how traditional xiaoshuo as a narrative genre was shaped by various didactic agendas and by an obsession with the human proclivity to evil, a tendency obviously contradictory to the dominant Confucian belief in human perfectibility.
Jinghua yuan, Lu mudan, and the Evolution of the Literati Novel during the
Nineteenth Century
Stephen Roddy, University of San Francisco
The novel Jinghua yuan (1821-1828) has often been compared to Honglou meng, with which it shares a number of features in common, including a cast of talented females, their contests on literary and scholarly subjects, and garden imagery. Few have noted, however, that the novel Lu mudan (The Green Peony , 1800) appears in all likelihood to have provided the blueprint from which Li Ruzhen, the author of Jinghua yuan, took both his plot outline (the overthrow of Wu Zetian), as well as numerous motifs, characters, and other details. Scholars may have neglected this relationship in part due to the disparity between Jinghua yuan, a highly polished example of the literati novel, and the decidedly middlebrow Lu mudan, a rather undistinguished example of the historical-military romance of the early- to mid-Qing period. My paper will analyze how Li Ruzhen reworked the materials of Lu mudan into the dazzling display of erudition that is Jinghua yuan. In so doing, I will attempt to delineate some of the generic conventions of literati fiction during its final flowering in the early nineteenth century, and treat the question of whether the use of the trope of irony remains useful in distinguishing this literary form in its later manifestations. To further illustrate the contrast between Jinghua yuan and its source, I will draw examples from the nearly contemporaneous Kinzesetsu bishonen roku (1830) of Takizawa Bakin, which has also been demonstrated to have borrowed substantially from Lu mudan.