Telling Details

Chinese Fiction, World Literature

Jiwei Xiao

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000533316
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What is a detail? How is it different from xijie, its Chinese counterpart? Is "reading for the details" fundamentally different from "reading for the plot"? Did xijie xiaoshuo, the Chinese novel of details, give the world its earliest form of modern fiction? Inspired by studies of vision and modernity as well as cinema, this book gazes out on the larger world through the small aperture of the detail, highlighting how concrete literary minutiae become "telling" as they reveal the dynamics of seeing and hearing, the vibrations of the mind, the complexity of the everyday, and the imperative to recognize the minute, the humble, and the hidden. In a strain of masterpieces of xijie xiaoshuo, such details play a key role in pivoting the novel from didacticism towards a capacious modern form.

Examining the Chinese detail as both a common idiom and a unique concept, and extrapolating it from individual works to the culture at large, reveals under-explored areas of the Chinese novel: its psychological depths, its connections with other genres and forms, its partaking in Chinese material life and capitalist modernity, as well as repressions and difficulties surrounding its reception in national and international contexts. With carefully chosen case studies, Xiao's book not only exemplifies the value of deep reading in approaching complex works of Chinese fiction as world literature, it also throws light on the aesthetics and politics of "the unseen," which has become central to a humanist tradition that flows across literature, cinema, and other art forms.

Part One Detail and Difference

DOI: 10.4324/9781003100591-2

I. What is xijie xiaoshuo?

One common impression about the traditional Chinese novel is that it often looks rather “flat.” Details spread out horizontally on the “surface.” From a modern Western reader’s point of view, the noticeable lack of “psychological depth” in Chinese novels can look like a glaring shortcoming. It contrasts with the canonized Western models: Stendhal’s lengthy interior monologues, Dostoevsky’s tormented soul-searching, Flaubert’s free indirect speech, and the deep stream-of-consciousness searches for memory and truth in the works by modernists such as Proust and Woolf.

Just as the use of “linear perspective” is one approach to painting, the novelistic reliance on descriptive exhaustiveness and direct and penetrating psychological depiction is only one way of representing the inner reality. It should not be considered as the only way, or the standard way. In addition, certain Western modernist novels – the “flat” or neutral style praised by Roland Barthes (1915–1980) in Writing Degree Zero, for example – as well as certain modern Chinese novels written under mixed native and Western influences all tell us that neither the psychologically penetrating approach nor the flat style is culturally pre-determined. One tendency might be more obvious than the other in one national canon, reinforced by cultural and other non-literary factors.

Flat but Not Shallow

Flat does not mean shallow. Xijie xiaoshuo is exemplary in showing this attribute of the Chinese novel.¹ In some of the best “fiction of details,” one finds what Eileen Chang (1920–1995) calls the effect of “shen-ru-qian-chu,” a phrase she glosses to mean “going deep inside but making it look flat on the outside” (“Tan kanshu” 309). In the late 1970s and the 1980s Chang was apparently under the full influence of two important vernacular Chinese novels, The Dream of the Red Chamber and The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, which she was reading closely. In these texts, individualities are revealed through private moments, yet still more often through complicated interpersonal relations and social settings – sometimes even with the subject absent from the scene or only obliquely referenced.² The literary details are neither objects nor signs. They function as intermediaries to integrate the perceiving subject and the perceived object. They not only construct the concrete worldly space and plausible social relationships but also carve out a vast realm of internal life and invisible relationships in this worldly space and society. In the best Chinese xijie xiaoshuo, or “novels of details,” the opposition between exteriority and interiority, tangibles and intangibles, is intricately reconciled. Next, I want to highlight a few additional features of xijie xiaoshuo.

Arranged elliptically across chapters, concrete details can evoke a sense of the passage of time. Whether the technique is effective depends on readers’ noticing the pattern. In classical xijie xiaoshuo texts such as Jin Ping Mei and The Dream of the Red Chamber, when a main character gets sick, details that give away the first sign and developing symptoms of the malady are carefully dropped in descriptions, in chitchats – ideally, dripping into readers’ minds as they read on.³ The year-by-year return to the New Year Lantern Festival in Jin Ping Mei might seem repetitious to readers interested in plot twists, but the details of the annual celebration are never the same. In fact, it is precisely through this prosaic yet also poetic refrain that the novel shows the gradual decline of Ximen House’s power and prosperity. Interestingly, although a modern writer like Shen Congwen writes an entirely different kind of fiction, he takes a similar approach to such phenomenological (non-)events as weather and local festivals (e.g., The Border Town). The emphasis is on what details can show: difference despite resemblance.⁴

One often finds in xijie xiaoshuo the kind of details that seem purely aesthetic, non-eventful, even useless at first sight. A sudden shower that falls one night affecting multiple characters’ plans and moods in parallel episodes in The Sing-song girls of Shanghai is astonishingly modern: the poetic contingency and temporal continuity it evokes remind us of the rain in other modern fiction and even neorealist cinema.⁵ Yet such use of details also harkens back to Jin Ping Mei, where rain and snow are neither timeless tropes with allegorical meanings, nor a crucial plot twist as in an action-packed narrative – the famous roof-sinking snow that happens to save the life of Lin Chong in Water Margin (Chapter 10), for example. Like clouds chased by the wind and rolling over mountain ranges, these aesthetic tangents cast evanescent shadows over readers’ minds. The effect is subtle, directed towards discovery and delayed gratification in rereading rather than immediate response. The way they generate the resonance between image and thought, as well as the oscillation between the ephemeral and the eternal, is quite close to what Walter Benjamin sees in Chinese Ming-Qing paintings and calligraphy: “That which they fix is no more immutable than a cloud. And this is their true and enigmatic substance, it consists of change, like life” (260).

Through details, writers create an indirect, sometimes quite subtle communication with readers. In classical Chinese literary prose, the literary meaning is ideally not imposed on the reader or explained. Chinese rhetorical tradition values “the pregnant inner energy of the noncoercive discourse that is wei (subtle)” and the text that gestures “towards inspiring features of a more hidden reality” and sows “the esthetic and intellectual seeds that are to grow in the audience” (Harbsmeier 884). The concealed or conserved energy also makes the text more supple and malleable to different readers’ responses. What does this “classical” poetics mean to the “vernacular” novel?

In an essay theorizing “the early Chinese short story,” Patrick Hanan argues that whereas the vernacular Chinese story tends to be referential, denotative, and exhaustive, the classical tale tends to be evocative, concentrated, and elliptical (175). The art of reading a Chinese classical tale, he says, “seems often to consist in recognizing ‘what is left unsaid’ ” (175). The question is: is the evocative and suggestive quality the defining difference between classical tales and the vernacular novel? Apparently with The Dream of the Red Chamber in his mind, Hanan says that Qing dynasty novels show a greater tendency towards a more evocative narrative style. Yet Jin Ping Mei, the novel that has an obvious influence on The Dream of the Red Chamber, demonstrates that a seemingly exhaustive and denotative vernacular fiction can achieve great formal subtlety and suggestiveness too; there is always some empty space left and some selections to be made, regardless of narrative density.

The Hybrid Style: The Lyrical & the Quotidian

Drawing on his analysis of personal essays by Ming writers, Li Zehou (1930–2021) points out that the kind of lyricism derived from direct observations of everyday life is seen across several genres of late Ming literature: the novel, theatre, and literary prose (198). Obviously, the literati’s participation in the production of all these genres is an important factor. This explains why the lyrical tendency of xijie xiaoshuo coincided with the elevation of the everyday in Ming non-fictional prose. Essays by mid-Ming prose writer Gui Youguang (1507–1571) are exemplary in demonstrating the lyrical expressiveness of quotidian details to register profound feelings. Late Ming scholars such as Yuan Hongdao (1568–1610), the contemporaries of Jin Ping Mei’s author, are seen to show great interest in “the everyday, trivial, commonsense, small and personal, quasi-public ‘private’ as figure and value (of writing) relative to the ‘public-official-political’ space of antiquity” (Ding 86). In their works, the minute is no longer the ephemera understood at the metaphysical level; it is now the observable.⁶ Details are no longer particularities of a static repository of knowledge; they now gain a liveliness in individual observations and sensory experience.

The discovery of the lyrical potential of the everyday happened to late Ming men in theatre too. In his book Casual Expressions of Idle Feelings (1671), dramatist and fiction writer Li Yu (1610–1680) advocates for probing–in detail–the ordinary yet infinitely fascinating subjects of human relationships and mundane life.⁷ His ideas are echoed by Zhang Dai (1597–1684). In a letter to his playwright friend, Zhang scolds the latter for pursuing spectacles of fantasy in his new chuanqi drama. He reminds him that everyday life has much to offer and that he could make something refreshing and everlasting out of it.⁸

In his own portrait of storyteller Liu Jingting (1587–1670), Zhang praises the way this famous professional storyteller performs: “His description of characters and things is all so vivid, down to the tiniest detail, yet also swift and clear, not repetitious at all” (187).⁹ A detail is a holler ricocheting off empty jars in Zhang’s description of Liu’s performance of a famous episode in Water Margin: “When Wu Song came into the tavern, he saw nobody was in. So he made a loud cry. All the empty vats and jars in the room rattled and boomed.”¹⁰ Zhang’s detail-centric transmission matches Liu’s storytelling. Throughout Dream Recollections, Zhang is concrete, exact, yet also imaginative: a peculiar species of peony has petals that are as thin as shafts of crane feathers; an enchanted audience can feel the subtlety in the singer’s voice as it first undulates like a silk thread and then assumes a piercing force.¹¹

The lyrical quality of a vernacular novel like Jin Ping Mei is not so easy to discern, precisely due to its hybridity, that is, its combination of entertainment, social observation, and psychological intricacy. The ambition of its anonymous author is not to produce a popular erotic fiction – as its later notorious reputation would have us believe. He must have both general readers and his literati peers in mind, especially the latter – readers who could discern his subtleties. In its best moments, as my discussion in Chapter 1 tries to show and other critics have also noticed, Jin Ping Mei proves that a “vulgar” text can become a prosaic counterpart to its literary better, poetry, in terms of formal ingenuity and delicacy, and even affective power. Its perceptual-psychological “lyricism” can be seen through a comparison with a different approach to details in other late Ming vernacular stories.

In his insightful but rather sketchy overview of late Ming literature, Li Zehou does not really explain how quotidian materials are lyricalized in fiction and theatre. One guesses that he is also limited by the fiction specimens he chooses for study, a collection of short stories compiled by Feng Menglong (1574–1646) in Sanyan (1624).¹² Details in these stories often serve a functional – rhetorical or plotting – role, even though from time to time they can suddenly switch on our interest in themselves. In “Two High-min...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One Detail and Difference
• Part Two Fiction of Details
• Afterword
• List of Chinese Terms and Names
• Index