Western Han: A Yangzhou Storyteller's Script.

• Author: Hegel, Robert E.
• Position: Book review

Western Han: A Yangzhou Storyteller's Script. Edited by VIBEKE BORDAHL and LIANGYAN GE. Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Monographs, vol. 139. Copenhagen: NIAS PRESS, 2017. Pp. x + 742. [pounds sterling]150, $200.

As inheritors of China's great written tradition, modern China's literary historians have quite naturally focused their attention on texts. Their efforts produced a spate of bibliographies and textual histories as these scholars surveyed collections of texts at home and abroad. A predilection for texts also informed early studies of China's great and diffuse oral traditions of stories told and performed over the centuries: parallels in story material led to the conclusion that the novels (zhanghui xiaoshuo [phrase omitted] ) and short stories (huaben xiaoshuo [phrase omitted]) of the Ming period were intimately connected to the storytellers of marketplace and teahouse and itinerant groups of players. The nature of this connection was debated: were the printed versions of these narratives transcriptions of performance? Were they the scripts used by oral performers or modified versions of the same? Did the term huaben actually mean "prompt book"? And were the great Ming vernacular short stories simply "imitation prompt books," or ni huaben [phrase omitted]?

Political and intellectual preconceptions often intruded upon these debates, which were not put to rest by modern storytellers who claimed to use no scripts at all, and indeed, professionals performed with no text in front of them. References to storytelling in the writings of literati confirmed this practice historically as well. Western theories were brought to bear on the question, with the result that the idea of composing extemporaneously using standard formulae and stock phrases inspired scholars to look for just such elements in existing stories and novels as a way to prove the connection. Subsequent research demonstrating that much of Ming-Qing vernacular fiction was adapted from earlier textual sources--in the literary language--has still not silenced the idea that storytellers from the lower classes produced all "popular literature."

But there were suggestions that schools of storytellers (often a hereditary profession), like fortunetellers and physicians, did in fact have written texts that were carefully preserved and transmitted from generation to generation as training material. However, none had been subjected to scholarly scrutiny. Starting in the 1950s efforts were made to transcribe the oral tales of living raconteurs, but then these were edited to make the printed versions read like novels, for an audience of modern non-specialist readers, not for the scholars who might want to study the language and style of performance. (1) Thus throughout most of the twentieth century, ramifications of the complex relationship between the oral and the written traditions of popular literature remained largely mysterious to all but a handful of scholars.

A leader of this small group was Vibeke Bordahl, Senior Research Fellow at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at Copenhagen University. Starting in the 1990s she, together with several colleagues, began producing groundbreaking studies of storytelling in the Yangzhou pinghua [phrase omitted] tradition. She interviewed practitioners, while Jette Ross photographed them in performance; Bordahl transcribed, analyzed, and translated key scenes from their narratives. And she carried out extensive historical research, often working with younger scholars including Ge Liangyan and Margaret B. Wan in the United States and European colleagues to publish studies that form the cornerstones of this area of research. Yet in several ways, the present publication outshines all her previous work in the degree to which it provides...