Organizer and Chair: Stephen H. West, University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: Theodore Huters, University of California, Los Angeles
We often work on topics, genre, or themes in traditional China as if they were accepted bodies of knowledge that have an unproblematical organic, even natural, shape. To do so often makes us complicit in maintaining existent boundaries and implicit historical or cultural fashionings of knowledge. Dramatic literature (as opposed to performance) represents a unique case study in this respect, since it was transplanted from an early urban, mercantile, and public world to the private gardens of writers and personalized, small-scale performance.
As it moved into this new hot-house environment, it was not only manured by the rich tradition of polite letters, but its appearance as an exotic in a familiar garden of native plants created a need to tame and naturalize it by constructing a taxonomy that placed it in the same order as polite letters, but still allowed morphological difference. That is, dramatic literature was not only nurtured, spliced, grafted, and trimmed by pressures of the structures and ideological norms of polite literature, but was also reshaped in its presentation to the outside world as a generic form of writing that fit well into the phyla that represented "real" literati endeavor.
If we look at this process historically, we can see how the criticism of dramatic literature has yielded to the pressures of historical contingency. These pressures tend to form in the pre-modern period around the conflict between vernacular and universal, between localized dialect, vulgar representation of local culture and language, and a cosmopolitan universal language and ideology. This is embedded partially in the nature of writing because pronunciation (as opposed to phonology) cannot be represented by the written character. As early as Wang Jide, in the early 17th century, we find a plea to accept essentially local forms (i.e., northern drama) as a universal cultural and linguistic model. This becomes a part of the agenda of critics, and anticipates the 20th century move to make Peking Opera a national operatic form (guoju).
In the twentieth century, when a true history of dramatic literature began under the pen of Wang Guowei, we find the issue of local versus universal now transferred to a global scale. Modern literary historians are driven primarily by the needs of nationalism to define a "Chinese" drama that can take its appropriate place in the arboretum of world drama. This process accelerated after the May 4th movement, when the issue of language came to the forefront. Ignoring the previous four centuries of dramatic criticism, modern scholars fervently promoted "baihua" as a pure voice of "the people." This not only ignored the obvious relationships between dramatic literature and other forms of poetic production, but began to create a false history of production of dramatic literature.
We seem poised on the brink of rediscovering the complexity of early dramatic literature; we should also be poised on the brink of discovering the muted agenda and hidden voices of criticism and history of drama. This will not only allow us to rethink early texts, but will provide, as well, a beginning study of the intricate processes of cultural hegemony, nation-building, and ideological determinism, and how these forces shape modern academic discourse.
Empire and Eros in Hongli ji (The Red Pear Blossom)
George R. Krompacky, Jr., Hamilton College
This paper analyzes the nature of the literati appropriation of drama into the late Ming chuanqi genre, as manifested by the example of Xu Fuzuo’s Hongli ji (The story of the red pear blossom). The only extant antecedent for this play is Zang Maoxun’s standardization/revision of Zhang Jinshu’s Xie Jinlian shijiu honglihua zaju (Xie Jinlian with a poem, wine and a red pear blossom), in which dynastic upheaval and foreign invasion are all but invisible; in Xu Fuzuo’s version, however, these elements become part of the play’s fundamental plot structure as an apparently simple romance is set against the backdrop of the Jurchen invasions of the late Song dynasty. This martial expansion of plot naturally affects the marital theme of the caizi jiaren relationship, the center of the zaju. Can this change be attributed to generic demands driven by Ming literati sensibilities, qualifying this chuanqi as an attempt to ennoble the story of a courtesan and a dilettante, or is Xu’s adaptation more accurately seen as his particular reading of the zaju against the body of chuanqi drama at that point in the seventeenth century, an adaptation fitting an agenda other than moralistic revision? For comparison, the less well-known Honglihua ji, by Wang Yuanshou, will show an alternative adaptation competing with the vision of Xu Fuzuo.
"Cheap Rhymes" for Troubled Times: Kong Shangren’s Tao hua shan
Sophie Volpp, University of California, Davis
Chinese theater resists definition: although, for example, most histories claim that Yuan drama is a vernacular form, Ming drama an elite, recent research reveals that this schema obfuscates the complex intermingling of social strata the theater makes possible. In this paper, I discuss Kong Shangren’s drama The Peach Blossom. Fan (Tao hua shan) as the culminating example of the theater’s resistance to definition as an elite or vernacular form Tao hua shan illustrates the complexity of the changing nature of social ties between literati and actors/courtesans/musicians through the seventeenth century not only within its text but in the circumstances of its composition, having been written by a descendant of Confucius who hired musicians to teach him the technical aspects of dramatic composition.
Completed in 1699, Tao hua shan functions as a capstone to the seventeenth-century efflorescence of literati drama. It is deeply informed by the late-Ming envisioning of drama as a polite form and a private literary art. Yet its primary concern is the public role of the theater in national salvation, and it draws upon the vernacular heritage of the theater to make its case that the theater provides a unique and needed form of catharsis to a public traumatized by the fall of the Ming. I examine the ways in which Kong elevates the status of the theater by recasting its history. He grants the theater a classical genealogy that rescues it from its vernacular origins, aligning it instead with the most sanitized of all literary forms—ritual. Yet at the same time, Kong argues that it is the theater, not ritual, that is the remedy for the ills of the age. Ritual is outmoded and antique, while the vernacular quality of the theater renders it vital and contemporary.
This interplay between vernacular and elite modes of literary expression within Tao hua shan itself exemplifies the way in which seventeenth-century drama is, in West’s words, pressured to conform to "the structures and ideological norms of polite literature," while still being allowed "morphological differences." Kong ultimately follows the neither/nor logic that, we might argue, characterizes the production of drama as a genre. Kong makes the strongest theoretical statement regarding the role and place of the theater of any seventeenth-century dramatist, suggesting that the theater is a literary form uniquely able to wend its way among social strata.
From Systematic Treatise to Hybrid Text: Xianqing ouji (1671) and the Undoing of Chinese Drama Theory
Patricia A. Sieber, Ohio State University
This paper compares the modern scholarly tropes framing Li Yu’s 1671 Xianqing ouji against the potential meanings of this text in a 17th century context. Haunted by a scientistic model of disciplinarity and rigor, much modern criticism has taken Xianqing ouji’s sections on drama out of context, while at the same time praising them for their methodical approach to playwrighting. Such critical practice posits a genealogic progression towards ‘modern’ ‘Western’ forms of expression. By contrast, rather than singling out the sections on drama within Xianqing ouji, this paper seeks to examine what notions of textuality, materiality, and subjectivity inform the Xianqing ouji as a whole in order to delineate how the text figures the place of drama in the broader social and cultural imaginary. In particular, the paper asks how Li Yu’s text renegotiates the boundaries between different forms of textuality—for instance, how does the hypercommentatorial nature of the text hybridize manuscript and print practices? How is the fact that Xianqing ouji simultaneously engages with different types of texts such as imperial edicts, literati manuals of connoisseurship, and commercial encyclopedias significant? The paper also examines how the production and consumption of plays is figured within the larger context of materiality. For instance, is writing and watching plays different from the creation and appreciation of other literary or material artifacts? Finally, the paper addresses the question of what sort of social subjects are embodied within this text, especially in terms of how such subjects acquire, manage, and dispose of financial, symbolic, and sexual resources. Ultimately the paper will show that the modern emphasis on systematicity obscures the fundamentally hybridized and refracted nature of Xianqing ouji and the place of drama within it.
Wang Guowei and the Construction of Modern Drama Studies
Yuming He, University of California, Berkeley
This paper is a study of the emergence of the new discipline of Chinese drama studies in the early 20th century, focusing specifically on the central figure in its development: Wang Guowei. Wang’s activities are examined in three settings: the new intellectual institutional framework—printed media—in Shanghai; the interaction between Chinese and Japanese scholars on the subject of drama; and the influence of Western perspectives on drama and literature among educated Chinese and Japanese. The paper suggests that the activities of Wang Guowei are part of a larger picture of reconstructing and reconceiving Chinese drama in a newly defined intellectual institutionalism.
Through his interaction with Kano Naoki and Suzuki Torao of Kyoto Imperial University while he was in Japan, Wang Guowei began to consider Western positions on drama and literature, as filtered through their eyes. He abandoned his earlier opinion of Chinese theater, and began to utilize the printed media in Shanghai to reshape thinking on drama and drama scholars’ relationship with their subject. Wang Guowei stung by Japanese media criticism of Chinese theater as infantile, and aware of a newly articulated field of academic study of Chinese drama in Japan, began to construct a new historical and literary approach to Chinese drama. To do this he first had to define a central (zhong) place for a distinctly Chinese form of dramatic representation, poised between the west (Europe/America) and the east (Japan).
But what begins as a mission to vitalize one’s national literature and scholarship, and place them in a global perspective, ends up being a self-congratulatory claim of "I" in a foreign land, the assertion of a strong ego and a newly constructed self as an icon responsible for reshaping the boundaries of orthodox cultural models.