Table Of ContentCHINESE NARRATIVE
CRITICAL AND THEORETICAL ESSAYS
CHINESE NARRATIVE
CRITICAL AND THEORETICAL
ESSAYS
ANDREW H. PLAKS, EDITOR
With a Foreword by
Cyril Birch
CONTRIBUTORS
Kenneth J. DeWoskin Peter Li
Eugene Eoyang Shuen-fu Lin
Patrick Hanan Andrew H. Plaks
Robert G. Hegel David T. Roy
C. T. Hsia John C. Y. Wang
Yu-kung Kao Kam-ming Wong
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Copyright © 1977 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press
Princeton, New Jersey
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press
Guildford, Surrey
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
will be found on the last printed page of this book
Printed in the United States of America
by Princeton University Press
Princeton, New Jersey
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword
CYRIL BIRCH IX
I. EARLY HISTORICAL AND FICTIONAL NARRATIVE
Early Chinese Narrative: The Tso-chuan as Example
JOHN C. Y. WANG 3
The Six Dynasties Chih-kuai and the Birth of Fiction
KENNETH J. DEWOSKIN 21
A Taste for Apricots: Approaches to Chinese Fiction
EUGENE EOYANG 53
II. MING AND EARLY CH'ING FICTION
Narrative Patterns in San-kuo and Shui-hu
PETER LI 73
The Nature of Ling Meng-ch'u's Fiction
PATRICK HANAN 85
Chang Chu-p'o's Commentary on the Chin p'ing mei
DAVID T. ROY 115
Sui Tang yen-i and the Aesthetics of the Seventeenth-
Century Suchou Elite
ROBERT G. HEGEL 124
III. MIDDLE AND LATE CH'ING FICTION
Allegory in Hsi-yu Chi and Hung-lou Meng
ANDREW H. PLAKS 163
Point of View, Norms, and Structure: Hung-lou Meng and
Lyrical Fiction
WONG KAM-MING 203
Lyric Vision in Chinese Narrative: A Reading of Hung-lou
Meng and Ju-Hn Wai-shih
YU-KUNG KAO 227
CONTENTS
Ritual and Narrative Structure in Ju-Un Wai-shih
SHUEN-FU LIN 244
The Scholar-Novelist and Chinese Culture: A Reappraisal
of Ching-hua Yuan
c. τ. HSiA 266
IV. CHINESE NARRATIVE THEORY
Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative
ANDREW H. PLAKS 309
List of Contributors 353
Index 357
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The essays collected in this volume represent revisions or rewritings
of papers originally presented at the Princeton Conference on Chinese
Narrative Theory held at Princeton University on January 21 and 22,
1974. In addition to the authors whose contributions appear here, the
participants in the conference included Professor Anthony Yu of the
University of Chicago and Professor Richard Strassberg of Yale Uni
versity, as well as the discussants Professor T'ien-yi Li of Ohio State
University, Professor Cyril Birch of University of California, Berkeley,
and Professor Frederick W. Mote of Princeton University. In addition
to acknowledging here the assistance of Professor Y. K. Kao, who was
co-convener of the conference with me, I must record my gratitude to
the entire East Asian community of faculty, students, and staff at
Princeton, who provided support of many kinds during the conference
and the production of this volume.
We wish to express our gratitude to the Committee on Studies of
Chinese Civilization of the American Council of Learned Societies,
and to the Program in East Asian Studies of Princeton University for
their generous provision of financial and other support that made
possible both the original conference and the present symposium
volume.
A.H.P
FOREWORD
CYRIL BIRCH
The scholarly studies assembled here testify to the recent surge of in
terest in Chinese narrative. Various factors underlie this phenomenon,
but two are particularly worth noting. First, we must acknowledge the
preeminence of fiction among the arts of revolutionary China in this
century. Of all civilizations the Chinese has always been the most
intensely literary. Sensing the need for revitalized cultural forms to
guide the emergence of their country into the modern world, intel
lectuals from Liang Ch'i-ch'ao on called most insistently for serious
new works of fiction. Hand in hand with the creation of new fiction
went the study of the indigenous tradition. Lu Hstin was the first and
greatest of the creative writers who answered Liang's call in the fertile
decades before the war with Japan, and it was no accident that he was
also the first to attempt a history of traditional narrative. The study
of the origins of storytelling and the novel in China, the searches for
early editions and the identifications of authorship, all took their rise
in the years following the May Fourth movement of 1919. As the present
manuscript goes to press, the promotion of ideological unity in China
is being effected by a nationwide campaign, already some months
underway, of mass critiques of the fourteenth-century novel Shui-hu
chuan. Clearly the national leaders recognize the hold of fiction on the
popular mind and are able to exploit its deep-rooted symbolism for
contemporary ideological ends.
For a second development we must turn to the Western world,
which indeed in the late nineteenth century had offered its own burgeon
ing modes of fiction for the inspiration of Japan and China in turn.
In the West the criticism of narrative lagged surprisingly behind its
creation. Little was done before the present century to develop the
concepts of such self-conscious practitioners as Flaubert and James into
systems of critical method. Over the past twenty-five years the theory
and practical techniques of criticism of fiction have rapidly gained in
sophistication. Scholars in the field of Chinese literature cannot fail
to be excited by the prospect of new and sharper tools for analyzing
style, narrative method, and modes of structuring. Hopes ride high
that with these tools they will succeed in exposing more and more satis-
IX
FOREWORD
fying layers of meaning in the tales, romances, and historical narratives
of China's past centuries.
At the very least the critic can intensify, by helping us to understand,
that joy that we immediately find in Chinesef iction.S urely we are doing
more than merely escape our harsh modern reality when we enter the
worlds of the great cyclical novels. We read of Chu-ko Liang of the
Three Kingdoms, weeping as he watches thef ierym assacre his own clever
scheming has brought about. Are we simply being entertained at this
point, or are we sharing in a moment of tragic grandeur as the seed is
sown for the decline of true nobility? Or when Sung Chiang poisons
Li K'uei at the end of the Shui-hu story, tells him what he has done and
why, and is lovingly forgiven, are we just being titillated by a novel
twist of events, or led to the climax of a carefully structured human
relationship of archetypal quality? How are we to account for the
passions we commit to the young lovers of the Dream of the Red
Chamber, or for our sense of deeper meanings beneath the hilarity of
Pigsy's adventures in Hsi yu chil
For we in the West are not, after all, in a position so very different
from the original Chinese audiences. We, like they, can respond to a
work on any one of many levels. We have our peculiar difficulties:
we are unduly appreciative of exotic local color, we have more dis
beliefs to suspend, we may be unduly repelled by moral homilies we
wrongly suspect of disingenuity. But on the whole we will settle for
simple entertainment rather than work towards fuller understanding.
This is when we need the critic's help. He can bring us closer to the
position of the great readers of the past, those gifted men like Chin
Sheng-t'an, Chang Chu-p'o, or "Chih-yen-chai" who understood the
full force of the works they devotedly annotated.
We need the critic's help also when we move from aesthetic enjoyment
to the contemplation of a work of narrative as a document of man's
intellectual history. Chinese stories and novels no doubt belonged to
a minor tradition rather than to the central elite culture of historiog
raphy, philosophical prose, and lyric verse. But the divergence can easily
be exaggerated. The long early cycles that seem to have grown like
coral reefs by processes of accretion ended by enshrining the moral
values and philosophical bases of an entire civilization. In more than
one later age the most brilliant minds turned to the writing of fiction
or plays for the stage. The insights of thef ifteenth-centuryp hilosopher
Wang Yang-ming and his school are imprinted on the stories of the
following century. Read by children or by the semi-educated, orally
presented by storytellers or transferred to the dramatic stage, the great
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