COMMENTARY AND XIAOSHUO FICTION.

• Author: WONG, TIMOTHY C.
• Position: Bibliography included - Review

David L. Rolston's latest work on the commentary accompanying traditional xiaoshuo narratives brings out the need to reexamine our understanding of how the Chinese used to write fiction. But because he does not challenge current assumptions of essential similarity between xiaoshuo and modern Western novels, Rolston misses the chance to extrapolate from his findings fundamental aspects of xiaoshuo's own identity.

DAVID L. ROLSTON'S SECOND BOOK on Chinese fiction commentary will surely be regarded as major contribution to our understanding of a distinctive, if not altogether unique, feature of xiaoshuo [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (or traditional Chinese fictional) narrative. Until recently, students of the subject in both China and the West have by and large shown a curious reluctance to direct attention to any feature of traditional xiaoshuo--literally, the "minor stories"--that would give the genre an identity distinct from that of the modern Western novel. [1] Unlike the earlier volume Rolston edited, [2] in which he deferred to the eminent scholars whose translations of traditional commentaries made up the core, though not the bulk, of the work, this second effort is his own and fittingly marks him as a preeminent expert on the subject. If he does not venture to hypothesize on the causes or consequences of the ubiquity of commentary in premodern xiaoshuo, he provides the wherewithal for others t o do so. This is surely sufficient to make the book indispensable for students of xiaoshuo fiction, even though we might wish for greater indication of its potential for advancing the understanding of how the Chinese used to write fiction.

This second major work on the commentary found in all successful xiaoshuo before Western ideas on the novel overwhelmed the genre after the turn of the century can be seen as a final by-product of a conference on Chinese narrative held at Princeton University in 1974. Rolston explains in the first work that it was planned by conference participants to include input from traditional "critics in the modern interpretation of Chinese "novels," so as to avoid "the imposition of foreign frameworks and literary theory onto a tradition alien to them.' [3] In the quarter century since, even in contemporary China and Taiwan, the task has proven more elusive than anyone might have imagined. The reasons for this deserve greater attention than can be given here, but they may be found initially in the universal acceptance of the "new and sharper tools for analyzing style, narrative method, and modes of structuring" derived from the fiction of the modern West. [4] Using these tools has indeed opened up new vistas in our un derstanding of xiaoshuo. On the other hand, because they are gleaned from a literary experience not yet shown to be universal, they have also limited the critical exploration of fundamental differences between xiaoshuo--which, until the second quarter of this century, was regarded as a minor tradition in China--and the Western novel--which rose in nineteenth-century Europe and America to become the dominant literary genre of our time. To Andrew Plaks, a force behind the 1974 conference and one of the very few who did confront the question of basic similarities and differences between Chinese and Western fiction, xiaoshuo simply "do what novels are supposed to do, or more to the point... they lend themselves readily to the types of literary analysis generated by studies of the European and American novel." [5] Even as it examines in impressive detail a feature that clearly distinguishes traditional xiaoshuo from the fiction of the modern world, Rolston's book never really attempts to challenge Plaks' conclusi on, never seeks to break through the ready-made molds set for old Chinese fiction by so many who study it in our time. For this reason, we can conclude that he shows an inadequate awareness of the full potential of his work, which is capable of yielding invaluable insight into the xiaoshuo texts that have come down to us. To a modern critic like Martin Huang, for example, these texts have been puzzling because they so regularly include two characteristics: the presence of commentaries printed "alongside the text proper of most works" and "the complex textual histories almost all these works have." [6]

THE MODE OF COMMENTARY

Neither Rolston nor Huang have paid much attention to the fact that commentary has been integral to xiaoshuo narratology, especially after the vernacular language became its most popular medium. In short stories, such as those we find in the three late-Ming anthologies known as the Sanyan, the role of commentator is inseparable from that of narrator. The paradigmatic story which leads off the collections, "Jiang Xingge Chonghui Zhenzhu Shan" [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (a.k.a. "The Pearl-sewn Shirt"), starts out with the narrator reciting a poem and then offers the following directly to the reader:

These lyrics are to a tune called "Moon Over the West River." They urge you to be content with your lot in life, to accept what your fate allots to you and not to attow the four vices of "wine," "women," "wealth," and "wrath" to dampen your spirits and detract from your good behavior. Remember: You may not really attain happiness when you seek it; and even as you think you've gained an advantage in life, you may actually be losing your edge.... Gentle reader, listen to me as I tell you this tale about the "Pearlsewn Shirt," which demonstrates that karmic retribution is swift and certain--something of which your youthful sons and brothers might well take heed (emphasis added). [7]

Here, even before going into what P. D. Hanan calls "the mode of presentation," the narrator first employs what Hanan distinguishes as "the mode of commentary"- an integral part of what has become known as "the storyteller manner" in vernacular Chinese fiction. [8] Thus, the story was mistakenly considered by some scholars to be a "prompt book" written for novice tellers of tales. [9] But the indication here, far from that of a literate medium doing service to an oral one, is very much the opposite. The oral performer who tells stories to live audiences is portrayed in writing, to liven up the literary text and to capture the interest and commitment of the reader, by placing him imaginatively among an audience in a storytelling session. Hence the indiscriminate mixing of "reader" with listener, in this, probably the most carefully crafted story of the three collections.

The commentary put thus in the mouth of the narrator plays a rhetorical role more important to the narrative than its didactic message. It provides hints of what's to come and, to a certain extent, increases anticipation. It sets up a direct relationship between narrator and reader, both of whom then regard the characters and the plot from a certain detached distance. In this way, the reader becomes a silent participant in the narration, the imagined partner to an ongoing conversation about the story being narrated. We can safely assume the heavy influence of oral storytelling in this kind of heavy-handed framing, an influence that goes well beyond the adaptation of the vernacular language to the written medium.

Actual storytelling sessions, say, in the Song dynasty, were surely much more drawn out than those mimicked in the written texts. It is reasonable, on the other hand, to surmise that written xiaoshuo, especially in the vernacular, preserve the influence of the oral storyteller for our time, and not just in terms of rhetoric, but also in terms of the attitude of its writers and readers. Before Jin Shengtan (1610-61) introduced another voice "between the lines" of the Shuihu zhuan (a.k.a., Water Margin or Outlaws of the Marsh) by adding pingdian [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] commentary, the idea that, aside from relating the story, the narrator cum commentator enhances its appeal by directly addressing his audience, was surely not new. Rolston (pp. 25-27) follows much received wisdom in anointing Jin "Mr. Pingdian," who tried to raise the status of the Shuihu, with its trappings of oral narration, by commenting on it in the same manner one would comment on a text from the Confucian canon, the quintessential example of literate culture. [10] Jin, on the other hand, did not stop with commenting, as he would surely have done if he had been dealing with a traditional Confucian text. He went ahead, with no real qualms, to take over, as proprietor, the work that modem critics still assign principally to the author and only secondarily to an editor. As noted by Rolston, Jin inserted material and changed much of the text he received, to the extent of truncating well over a third of the original narrative (pp. 27-30). [11] In effect, he blatantly altered the received text to suit his commentary, rather than the other way around. This would not have been acceptable in situations where the author--be he Confucius or Shi Nai'an--were considered a figure of stronger authority than the commentator.

ORALITY WITHIN LITERACY

Both Jin Shengtan and his contemporary Feng Menglong (1574-1646), who was responsible for the Sanyan and who likely put the "Pearl-sewn Shirt" into its vernacular narratological form, [12] were bona fide "literati," highly educated members of the late Ming dynasty gentry who were conversant with the long-established idea that civilization itself is tied to the written word. Derk Bodde once explained it this way:

Our word "civilization" goes back to a Latin root having to do with "citizen" and "city." The Chinese counterpart, actually a binom, wen hua, literally means "the transforming [i.e., civilizing) influence of writing." In other words, for us the essence of civilization is urbanization; for the Chinese it is the art of writing.... Throughout their literate history, the Chinese have been much more interested in the written than the...