Rulin waishi and Cultural Transformation in Late Imperial China.

• Author: Wong, Timothy C.
• Position: Book Review

Rulin waishi and Cultural Transformation in Late Imperial China. By SHANG WEI. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, no. 59. Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, 2003. Pp. 356. $40.

Of the six lengthy Chinese fictional narratives classified as "classic," the eighteenth-century Rulin waishi (a.k.a. The Scholars) has attracted the attention of modern critics beyond its original popularity among Chinese readers both traditional and modern. The reason is not at all mysterious: it is the only traditional work of fiction that unequivocally criticizes the Chinese society of its time, seemingly in anticipation of the barrage of social criticism one finds in the so-called "modern" Chinese fiction of the 1920s and 30s, when intellectual China was in the throes of deciding how to rid itself of its cultural traditions, including its literary traditions, that appeared to be ill-fitted to the modern world at large.

Shang Wei's book-length study--of a work that, aside from English, has also been translated into Japanese, French, German, Russian, and Vietnamese--is the first in English in over twenty years devoted entirely to Rulin waishi. It raises once more the question of the narrative's essential meaning and significance in literary and historical terms. Shang takes a decidedly different tack from that of a vast majority of past and current critics who consider the work to be the outstanding example of satirical narrative in China before the late nineteenth-century invasion of cultural ideas from the West. As much difficulty as modern readers have had in deciphering its moral message, Rulin waishi has made the most sense when looked at as an indictment of later-imperial literati society seeking pragmatic success over idealistic self-cultivation, as both the preface and the extra-textual (or pingdian) commentary in the first published version (1803 Woxian caotang) suggest. In its literatus author Wu Jingzi's eyes, this self-cultivation has become possible only through uncompromising withdrawal from pragmatic social involvement, since the rewards of the striving for what the preface and the extra-textual commentary call "gong ming fu gui"--career, fame, wealth, and rank--had dominated the idealistically Confucian pursuit of humanistic relationships, art, and learning in his time. Later critics have heretofore attributed Wu's literary success to his satirical skills, even though he is without question a much kinder, gentler, and more subtle satirist than, for example, his eighteenth-century contemporaries writing in the "age of satire" in England. His more esoteric ideology, expressed in a rhetorical style which largely (though by no means completely) eschews traditional embedded commentary in favor of allowing readers to come to their own conclusions, has, on the other hand, opened the fictional work up to a host of even directly conflicting interpretations in our time. Those characters Wu Jingzi satirizes, moreover, he clearly does not condemn, making it even more difficult for his latter-day readers to discern his moral stance. (1)

As his title indicates, Shang Wei's rambling study does not so much utilize the intellectual history of the time to help illuminate these literary questions as it uses the literary work to help illuminate the intellectual history. This is of course valid, even though he essentially ignores the important question of why Wu Jingzi would choose to express something of such national and philosophical import as Confucian ritual in the lowly regarded fictional medium, employing the vernacular rather than the classical language, leaving out his name from the manuscript--a choice that caused his friend Cheng Jinfang to comment in a poem (ca. 1748-1750) that "I grieve for this man," because he had to be "by fiction known."

Like so many current considerations of the fiction medium (xiaoshuo, literally "minor narratives") of old China, Shang Wei's study essentially sidesteps any real distinctions between this medium and the novels which rose in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and America. He follows the lead of Shuen-fu Lin's early (1977)...