The Chinese Classic Novels (Routledge Revivals)

An Annotated Bibliography of Chiefly English-Language Studies

Margaret Berry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136836572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1988, this reissue is an important work in the field of national literary exchange. Declared by American Library Association in its Choice publication one of the ten best reference works of 1988, the volume has survived global change - politically, socially, economically, religiously, aesthetically - to promote cultural dialogue between China and the West. Besides the scores of annotated sources, the introductory essays remain as authentic and moving as the day of their appearance.

Equally to be observed is accelerating demand, especially in academic institutions, for global cultural exchange through national literatures. How can we of the English-speaking world, for example, adequately understand and converse with our Chinese counterparts without some appreciation of their culture, notably of Confucian and Taoist roles in their history as reflected in their literature?

Overall, a pioneering work whose reissue will be welcomed by both scholars and general readers alike.

CHAPTER ONE
General Introduction

Depending on one’s definition of fiction, the novel form can in any country be traced to the dawn of its art. Narrowing the concept to imaginative non-metrical narrative, one can still track it to a nation’s earliest sustained prose. Unsurprisingly, then, the Chinese novel’s distant antecedents include consciously fictive elements in pre-dynastic classics: the SHU CHING (BOOK OF HISTORY), for example; the CH’UN CH’IU (SPRING AND AUTUMN CHRONICLES); the ANALECTS; the BOOK OF MENCIUS; the TSO CHUAN COMMENTARY; or the BOOK OF CHUANG-TSE, and, later, the SHIH CHI (RECORDS OF THE HISTORIAN), compiled by Han Grand Historians Ssu-ma T’an and his more famous son Ssu-ma Ch’ien.

But in these works history, philosophy, and ethics are central, fiction but a maid. Not until the T’ang Dynasty (618–906) does prose fiction, in the ch’uan ch’i literary tales, emerge as an independent form centered on consciously shaped imaginative material. Written by scholars in classical language and a simple, moving style, ch’uan ch’i would soon at times merge with vernacular prose.

That vernacular prose, however, received its greatest impetus from Buddhist oral and written storytelling rising alongside ch’uan ch’i. Hundreds of pien-wen, Buddhist tales often with accompanying pictures and usually of religious import, are listed in the 30,000 Chinese manuscripts dating from the fifth through the thirteenth centuries found in Unit 16 of the frescoed Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. These were recovered when, in 1900, Sir Aurel Stein opened the Tun-huang archaeological complex between China and Central Asia near the end of the Great Wall. Combining religious zeal and sectarian talent, the pienwen exhibit numerous narrative techniques preparing the way for the novel: devices for creating suspense, underscoring dialogue, arousing laughter, exciting wonder, including song and recitation as in chantefable and drum-accompanied performances.

But if salvation of souls was pien-wen’s original goal, it did not for long so remain. Secular tales and domestic intrigue quickly found expression in the new medium. By Sung times (960–1279) Buddhism had waned, but not its storytelling art, now the special province of leisured middle classes in burgeoning urban districts, demanding entertainment. In amusement centers great and small, however, in city, town, and country, wherever people wanted to be amused and maybe in the process improved, storytellers’ guilds flourished. Some masters of the art wrote down plot notes providing a ground for inexhaustible improvisation, transitional cues, stock phrases to refresh their memories. Their introductions demanded dialogue, comedy, a song or two; breaks (to become novel chapter divisions) had to be provided for refreshment, money collection, and exhortation to attend the next session. Such matters required memoranda booklets called hua-pen, some of which developed their own unity and independence as reading material and became, as it were, novelettes. These hua-pen, with Yuan p’ing-hua (vernacular/simple-classical tales of an historical era rather than of individuals), became the immediate forebears of the novel form.

Inevitably, as narrative variety grew—historical, supernatural, realistic, religious— clusters of stories focused on the same person or event; cycles were developed. The novel was at hand, but not to be realized before absorption of Yuan dramatic techniques.

Mongols of the Yuan Dynasty (1260–1368), enamored by superior Chinese culture, especially its vernacular literature, had chosen drama as their favored form. Upon it, until then in official disfavor, and upon its theaters and performances they lavished unprecedented patronage. Drama, for its part, drew from history and fiction, whether single episodes, clusters of tales, or well-rounded cycles of events. All novelists being at heart dramatists, stage presentation could not but enrich storytellers’ developing powers of suspenseful narrative and vivid characterization.

With the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) arrived the full-fledged Chinese novel, a shaping of many episodes, developed perhaps in storytelling and drama, into a coherent whole. First to excel in the genre was the fourteenth-century SAN-KUO-CHIH YEN-I (ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS), recounting events during the fall of the Han Dynasty (202 B.C.-A.D. 220) and its turbulent aftermath and relying, not on vernacular texts, but on historical documents. In dominantly literary language, its contents are described as seventenths historical, three-tenths fiction.

SAN-KUO had dealt with dynasty-building; other yen-i treated the process of national stabilization or dynastic succession and increasingly relied upon vernacular rather than classical Chinese. Eventually and perhaps inevitably there arose the pseudohistorical novel, more properly called the romantic adventure novel, of which the greatest is the sixteenthcentury SHUI-HU CHUAN (THE WATER MARGIN). Claims of this work to historicity lay chiefly in the bandit hero’s name and in a vaguely formulated twelfth-century setting. Other such novels rose out of an author’s need to conceal identities, to find a suitable context for a story or theme, sometimes for the convenience of an easily defined setting. As well as providing the writer with a recognized past, “history” could supply other literary needs, including respectability, and authors were not remiss in availing themselves of so rich an opportunity.

Besides historical and pseudohistorical novels, others, less esteemed because less reliant on China’s known past, were the hsiao-shuo (a Han expression for trivial or undignified writing, which developed into a comprehensive term for short stories and non-historical novels) covering at first, vernacular narratives of manners, brothels, scholar-and-beauty romance, knight errantry, pornography, crime and detection, and moral and satirical allegory. The most famous collections of these forerunners of the realistic, non-historical novel appear in three volumes of editor Feng Meng-lung (1574–1646).

By the end of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) the supernatural novel HSI-YU CHI (MONKEY, or JOURNEY TO THE WEST), with its realistic implications for everyday life and its easily detected satire on religious institutions, had captivated the hearts of thousands of Chinese readers by its imaginative flamboyance, vivid characterization, and high comedy. CHIN P’ING MEI, the first novel of manners and domestic realism, had stunned them with its powerful satire on personal, familial, professional, and political corruption, seen from bourgeois perspective.

Despite literati rejection of hsiao-shuo (popular fiction) from the category of works distinguished as “literature,” many scholars and bureaucrats not only read and enjoyed these works, but often, anonymity assured, themselves wrote and disseminated them. With the expansion of printing and publishing and increasing urban middle-class taste for novels came demand for newer, more experimental approaches to the art of long fiction.

The eighteenth century, with its troubled consolidation of the Manchu Dynasty (1644– 1912) and the growing dominance of novel over short story, saw new forms arise, including two of China’s greatest novels. JU-LIN WAI-SHIH (THE SCHOLARS), written in exclusively vernacular but simple and dignified style, is China’s first known autobiographical novel, an embittered satire against corrupt social institutions, especially the examination system, depriving the idealist Confucian of noble public service and self-fulfillment therein. Greatest of all China’s novels, HUNG-LOU MENG or THE DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER, (also, in the Hawkes-Minford translation, known as SHIH T’OU CHI or THE STORY OF THE STONE) stands, with GENJI MONOGATARI, RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU, and MIDDLEMARCH, as a world classic of psychological realism. But HUNG-LOU MENG is, too, a novel of manners, a family saga, a pageant of eighteenth-century Chinese society, a tragic triangular love affair, an autobiography, an allegory against Manchu domination, a novel of initiation and apprenticeship—all these and more.

Authorship of classic Chinese novels presents numerous problems. Some of these spring from evolutionary and composite composition; others from exigencies spawned by official disdain for the theory and practice of fiction. Scholars today rigorously question authorship attributions not founded on assuredly contemporary evidence available in extant documents. The attributions persist, nevertheless, and become troublesome as one moves from critic to critic. Rendering the problem more complicated is the fact that not until late Ch’ing times did authorship become a viable economic choice; other incentives than fame and fortune had to inspire a novelist.

The six classic Chinese novels, not in all respects typical of their contemporary literatures, nevertheless invite some generalizations about their content and style.

The narratives show an unquenchable thirst for life, an affirmation of the world and zest for experience diametrically opposed to the dark, escapist views of Dravidian-based South Asian literatures or the nihilism of modern existentialist and absurdist Western writers. No ennui, as C.T. Hsia remarks, or arid cynicism afflicts Chinese characters; no Stranger (as in Camus) or Underground Man (as in Dostoyevsky) appears. Chinese classic novels show, too, insatiable curiosity about individuals, as often as not with self-destructive obsessions, confronting society.

Characteristic devotion to history and pressure to conform to long-established social norms in these novels invariably color events and relationships. All the narratives, with the possible exception of SAN-KUO-CHIH YEN-I, in some degree recognize as an appropriate novel function the criticizing of social and government excess. All are conscious of an overriding moral law and inexorable retribution for wrong. Most use, in Andrew Plaks’ terms, complementary bipolarity (yin/yang theory) and multiple periodicity (the five-elements system of correspondences) as structural entities. Rarely do the authors enter a character’s mind, instead revealing what they must of hidden motivations and reactions by gesture, symbol, and dialogue.

The most important single content factor is, however, the triple religious dynamic: Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist. Unstable political and social conditions of Ming and early Ch’ing Dynasties weakened traditional religions; despite the Neo-Confucianism now entrenched in officialdom, syncretism ruled the day. Frequently in the novels some aspect or other of one religion is given disproportionate emphasis, or two or three religions function without conclusive choice. One finds the same novel labeled by different scholars Confucian, Taoist, or Buddhist. In any event, all the religions, each in its own way powered by yin-yang and five-elements correspondences, strive toward harmony. That harmony— beginning with an individual’s own faculties, rises through family, state, world, and cosmos— to achieve the Great Harmony, the essential Chinese ideal.

Among the one hundred plus books and articles in the general bibliography certain interests and concerns stand out: 1) The need for a comprehensive, reliable history of Chinese literature, specifically of the Chinese novel. Such a work would, according to scholars here cited, involve both a) external literary history (as the status of literary creation, the development of vernacular vis-à-vis classical literature, censorship, subversiveness, social-economic-political factors, manuscript and print versions and variations, authorship and dating canons, schools, movements, writers, critical history), and b) internal development (as genres, structures, point of view, modes lyric, dramatic, and narrative, verisimilitude, archetypes, language, and other symbol systems).

2) The need for more aesthetic, formalist scholarship in appreciation of the Chinese novel, as compared with past emphasis on historical, textual, sociological, religious, political, autobiographical, and thematic studies.

3) The corresponding need for a poetics of Chinese literature, specifically for the novel. Such an articulation would call on theorists to formulate definitions, neither too broad nor too narrow, of literary genres, critical theories, terms and technical practices, and taxonomies acceptable to diverse literary schools. A number of articles here identify as relative to the novel little known and/or appreciated works and passages of theoretical and applied criticism in the Chinese literary canon.

4) The need, in fact, of a universal poetics in which Chinese theories and practices, critical and creative, would take their place in the body of world literature. For this end critics urge Chinese litterateurs first to clarify and articulate their own nation’s insights and achievements, then to integrate their findings with Asian poetics generally, and then, finally, to seek incorporation into a global poetics. Such a procedure might relieve the insecurities of Western scholars who, we are told, have been less than hospitable and courageous about the inclusion of Chinese writings in comparative, critical, and world-literature programs, courses, conferences, journals, and proceedings generally. An incidental but important consideration is the substantial work being accomplished in the field by Taiwanese Chinese as differentiated from the emphatically Marxist theories and practices of the People’s Republic. Another is the need to test the viability of modern Western critical theories—Freudian, formalist, archetypal, existentialist, feminist, structuralist, deconstructionist—in Asian literatures.

5) The need for better understanding of East-West literary relations. Such a goal involves, among other things, new and better translations, with introductions, commentaries, and annotations calculated to ease the transition from one culture to another. It involves, too, cultural exchange at personal, professional, and institutional levels, and accelerated use of media and computer science to urge and facilitate the reading of the great works, especially the novels, they being usually more amenable to translation than other forms. Persuasive articles cited below show, for example, how Western linear and architectonic approaches to fiction complement Chinese spatial and interstitial structuring.

6) The need for inclusion of Chinese literature (the novel) in the disciplines of world, critical, and comparative literatures, especially but not exclusively at the college and university levels. Curriculum shapers, textbook publishers, conference convenors must be alerted to the implied inferiority of an academic project which, aspiring to world perspective, fails to include adequate and appropriate Chinese matter, especially the novel. A Western literary work is inadequately known without the context and comparison supplied by its hemispheric counterpart.

7) A few critics advert to the need for exploration of the feminine presence or lack of it in the creation of Chinese literature, specifically the novels. More than one suggests that imbalances in some novels may be attributed to the lack in China of any institution comparable to Western feminine-oriented medieval and renaissance chivalry or the neo-classical salon.

8) The need to better probe the role of religion/ philosophy in a given work. If we understand these terms as relating to the basic value system on which a novel rests and the ways in which and the reasons for which they are, in the narrative, accepted or rejected, then a grasp of the author’s outlook real or presumed, is crucial for fruitful reading. In the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, for example, the crystallization of Neo-Confucian thought and Tung-lin Academy reforms profoundly affected attitudes and therefore behaviors relative to the self, society, nature, and cosmic harmony. These inevitably figure in a novel’s plot, setting, characterization, and theme.

9) The need to relate a work to its historical backgrounds, whether, in the case of the classic novels, to the Ming period (1368–1644), a time of recovery from one alien rule, the Yuan Dynasty (1260–1368), and advance toward another, the Ch’ing or Manchu Dynasty (1644–1912), or that last Dynasty itself. Sociologically these periods involve, among other factors, shifts of class perceptions of themselves and of others, a stiffening of female oppression among upper classes concurrently with a loosening of controls in the inferior grades; the intensive growth of cities; increased printing and publication, growing literacy, and inevitable censorship problems—all with important implications for the novel form.

Of the many subjects yet to be addressed by scholars and critics of the classic Chinese novel, one is the presence and role of untamed nature in the topological sense, including flora and fauna, mountains and skies, winds and waves and wilderness gen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter One: General Introduction
• Chapter Two: San-Kuo-Chih Yen-I (The Romance of the Three Kingdoms)
• Chapter Three: Shui-Hu Chuan (The Water Margin)
• Chapter Four: Hsi-Yu Chi (Monkey, or Journey to the West)
• Chapter Five: Chin P’ing Mei (The Golden Lotus)
• Chapter Six: Ju-Lin Wai-Shih (Unofficial History of the Literati, or the Scholars)
• Chapter Seven: Hung-Lou Meng (The Dream of the Red Chamber)