Session 17: Approaching Authenticity: Expressions of the Genuine in Drama and Narrative of Late Imperial China

Organizer: Carl A. Robertson, Southwestern University

Chair: Gary Seaman, University of Southern California

Discussant: Catherine Swatek, University of British Columbia

Keywords: China, literature, drama, narrative, authenticity, illusion.

This panel examines the manner in which concepts of authenticity are implied, challenged, and re-presented in drama and narrative of the Ming and Qing. Texts of this period attest to a fascination with the creation of worlds with shifting or heightened boundaries between falsehood, artificiality, illusion and the counterpart to these counterfeits, or supposed counterfeits—an idea of authentic feeling, experience, or signficance. This panel deals with ways in which writers, playwrights and commentators referred to authenticity, often as a form of personal aesthetic value.

The approaches of the papers and texts of this panel indicate the independent approaches possible with authenticity as a value. Mei Chun discusses how a play-within-a-play in the drama of Xu Wei suggests the authenticity of theatricality itself, of action distinct from its apparent replicated original. Carl Robertson demonstrates a subtle reference to a range of meanings, including personal authenticity, in an ostensible Daoist analysis of Xiyou ji (Journey to the West). Rania Huntington explores the figurative reference in the supernatural tales of Ji Yun to identify interplays between illusion and reality. Qiancheng Li discusses Jiang Shiquan’s play about the dramatist Tang Xianzu, particularly Jiang’s expansion and development of Tang’s dream worlds, arguing that the play betrays the tensions within Jiang’s own life when he attempts to come to terms with qing.

Making an "Authentic" Theatrical Copy in "The Crazy Drummer"

Chun Mei, Washington University, St. Louis

This paper attempts to use play-acting, a popular trope in both theater and fiction, to examine how late imperial Chinese writers conceptualized theatricality. The paper focuses on Xu Wei’s (1521–1593) zaju "The Crazy Drummer" (Kuang gushi) while drawing other examples from both late imperial fiction and other dramatic works.

In "The Crazy Drummer," Judge Cha is a spectacle-loving underworld figure who directs the reenactment of the famous scene of the eccentric scholar Mi Heng cursing the tyrant Cao Cao. Judge Cha uses the ghosts of Mi and Cao as his cast for an "authentic" theatrical copy for the underworld. As a model of meta-theater, the play within a play is constituted of the conscious intertwining of three self-referential parts: staging, impersonation, and spectatorship, displaying an interesting compatibility with the current approach of theatricality as an ongoing relationship between performer, audience, and the space in which the viewer and viewed come together.

The question is, how authentic can playacting be? Resourceful as the underworld judge is with his unique cast, the theatrical copy, framed in the displaced locale of the underworld court, is replete with cross acting and a confusion of performative identities between actor/role/character resulting in a farce, which, on the contrary, attests to the impossibility of replication. Inauthentic copy as it might appear the play exemplifies a conceptualization of a theatricality that is authentic in its own way; it is truthful to the nature of playacting.

Daoist Revision: The Quest for Authenticity in Commentaries to Xiyou ji

Carl Robertson, Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas

This paper explores references to authenticity (qing) in the commentaries to Xiyou ji. Of the seven extant traditional commentaries to Xiyou ji, five claim the text as an allegory of Daoist internal alchemy. But in the earliest of these five, Xiyou zhengdao shu (The book to enlightenment of the journey west, 1663), the Daoist claim seems compromised by conflating the meaning of a word for Daoist ascension (zhen) with a contemporary concern with personal authenticity (zhen) juxtaposed with "counterfeit" (jia)—a relationship that never occurs in the Daoist source texts which the commentators cite. Although subtle, this view is established in other texts and associations. Subsequent commentators accept the reference to some degree. Finally, this paper will question the relevance of this discussion to the text of the narrative itself. Certainly Xiyou ji, as with other extended narratives of the sixteenth century, questions the reader’s ability to identify the genuine, perceive counterfeits, and challenges the resolution of figurative language. But to what extent does the text initiate the commentators’ manner of exploring personal authenticity?

The Spectral Eye and the Human Heart: Envisioning the Interior in the Eighteenth-Century Classical Tale

Rania Huntington, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

It is a commonplace in Chinese supernatural tales to state that gods and ghosts see things that no human being can perceive, allowing for extrahuman judgment of human deeds and thoughts. This paper explores the envisioning of the human interior as perceived by a non-human audience, focusing on the work of Ji Yun (1724–1805), with other sources in the classical tale and vernacular fiction as a source of comparison.

The relationship of gods and spirits to authenticity and inauthenticity is complex and paradoxical. Aroused by and arousing the desires of the human heart, alien beings construct complex sensory illusions which deceive; yet at the same time, they perceive the human psyche as a visual spectacle, which should reveal genuine hidden truths. The human interior is turned outward, in shows of light, color, or miniature figures. Different kinds of judgment (moral, intellectual, and aesthetic) merge. There is a nuanced relationship between the spectral audience within the tale and the human audience of listeners and readers, for whom the gods and ghosts serve as a lens. This kind of tale allows exploration of conceptions of sight and the other senses, the human interior, perception, and judgment. What is the relationship between spectator and spectacle, human and inhuman? Ji Yun sometimes describes these tales as yuyan, allegories, raising the question of another kind of genuineness and artifice. In what way are metaphorical descriptions of the human interior made literal? Are gods and spirits, seen as metaphors themselves, those for whom metaphors are real?

Dream, Drama, and Metadrama: Jiang Shiquan’s Linchuan meng

Qiancheng Li, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

This paper studies the issue of authenticity on various levels in Jiang Shiquan’s (1725–1785) Linchuan meng, a play characterized by daring techniques and devices that may be described as "fantastic" in the vocabulary of modern criticism, with the Ming dramatist Tang Xianzu (1550–1616) as its protagonist. Ostensibly, the play, paying particular attention to Tang’s political involvements, aims to establish him as a man impeccable in loyalty and filial piety (zhongxiao wanren) rather than a dramatist, a revisionist attempt to transform Tang Xianzu. However, what distinguishes the play is none other than Jiang’s wrestling with how to come to terms with Tang’s plays. A drama that promises to be about Tang Xianzu’s life thus becomes a metadrama, a reflexive drama about dramas. Since all of Tang’s dramas contain dreams, Jiang’s play inevitably revolves around them. Jiang weaves an intricate web of dreams that reflect upon one another, culminating in the end of the play where Tang Xianzu meets the protagonists of his own plays—his dreams—in an inclusive dream. The play further explores the continuum of real life, dream, and play, partly a result of the tensions in Jiang’s own life and his inability to resolve them.