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University of California Riverside UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Theory of the Strange Towards the Establishment of Zhiguai as a Genre A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Mingming Liu June 2015 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Lisa Raphals, Chairperson Dr. Perry Link Dr. Matthew King Copyright by Mingming Liu 2015 The Dissertation of Mingming Liu is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Theory of the Strange Towards the Establishment of Zhiguai as a Genre by Mingming Liu Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Comparative Literature University of California, Riverside, June 2015 Dr. Lisa Raphals, Chairperson The problem of the strange has exerted a powerful fascination on different literary traditions. In China, zhiguai (translated as “accounts of the strange”) was produced in great number, ranging from administrative reports of drought and misrule to accounts of apparently supernatural events. What makes it even more intriguing is the involvement of Confucian literati; scholars who normally did not deign to discuss the extraordinary were actively engaged in compiling these accounts. Literary criticism on zhiguai has also been a tenuous construction. Zhiguai shifts among different bibliographical categories, and was not recognized as a genre until the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Even today there has never been scholarly consensus on its definition. Zhiguai, therefore, is strange in its content, compilation and criticism. What are these accounts? How shall we read them? By what criteria should we judge what is strange and what is not? My dissertation offers a theory of the strange by defining zhiguai as a genre. Tracing its development in iv classical Chinese literature, I analyze how zhiguai challenges categorical dichotomies – history vs. fiction, natural vs. supernatural, and belief vs. disbelief – and occupies a liminal status in between. The result is a reassessment of what is normal, natural and real vis-à-vis what is anomalous, supernatural and fantastic. Devising a new ontological framework – this-world and other-world(s), I argue that it is the interaction between the two – the esoteric and/or exotic and our quotidian empirical experience – that defines the genre. The theoretical part of the dissertation is complemented with two case studies – Shenxian zhuan (Traditions of Divine Transcendents), a 4th-century zhiguai collection, and various examples in contemporary Chinese cultural production from television programs to internet gossip. Through a diachronic study as such can I uncover how the strange is woven into everyday life, and how this age-old Chinese literary genre that appears to be marginalized in its own time and nearly extinct in our modern world is still thriving today. v TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE Introducing the Strange 1 CHAPTER TWO Truthfulness in the Strange: Philology of Zhiguai from Pre-Qin to Six Dynasties 8 CHAPTER THREE Playfulness in the Strange: Bibliography of Zhiguai from Tang-Song to Ming-Qing 30 CHAPTER FOUR This-World and Other-World(s): Theory of Zhiguai 42 CHAPTER FIVE Stranger than the Strange: A Case Study of Zhiguai 67 CHAPTER SIX Concluding the Strange or Not? 96 BIBLIOGRAPHY 104 APPENDICES 114 vi CHAPTER ONE Introducing the Strange The problem of the strange has exerted a powerful fascination on different literary traditions. In China, zhiguai (志怪 accounts of the strange) was produced in great number in the Six Dynasties (220-589 AD), ranging from administrative reports of drought and misrule to accounts of apparently supernatural events, including foxes transformed into human form, a tribe whose heads could take independent flight at night, and encounters with the dead. What makes zhiguai especially intriguing is the involvement of Confucian literati; scholars who normally did not deign to discuss the extraordinary were actively engaged in compiling these accounts. Literary criticism on zhiguai has been a tenuous construction. It was not recognized as a genre until the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), and even today there has never been scholarly consensus on its definition. Western scholars have attempted to impose such labels as myth, fantasy, and folklore on them, but the problems of these categories are obvious. Zhiguai, therefore, is strange in its content, compilation and criticism. Then what are these stories? Should we read these texts as aspects of actual life or authorial creations? By what criteria should we judge what counts as strange and what does not? In my dissertation, I offer a theory of the strange by defining zhiguai as a genre. Tracing its development in classical Chinese literary criticism, I analyze how zhiguai challenges categorical dichotomies such as history and fiction, natural and supernatural, and belief and disbelief. The result is a reassessment of what is normal, natural and real vis-à-vis 1 what is anomalous, supernatural and fantastic. I complement the theoretical part of the dissertation with two case studies – a 4th century hagiography and miscellaneous cases from contemporary Chinese cultural production. Through such a diachronic study can I uncover how the strange is woven into quotidian life, and how this age-old Chinese literary mode that appears to be marginalized in its own time and nearly extinct in our modern world is still thriving today. Before embarking on the journey, I would like to raise three questions to prepare us for the epistemological challenges that zhiguai poses. First of all, what is guai? What counts as strange? Zhiguai texts deal with strange events, strange persons, strange places, and strange things. They may include tales of prodigies, freaks of nature, bizarre births, and metamorphosis, most of which are believed to be improbable, but possible in real life, but is there a more rigorous critical approach to the question? Tzvetan Todorov, in his influential study of fantastic literature, distinguishes three basic genres: the marvelous, the fantastic, and the uncanny. If the narrated events accord with the laws of post-Enlightenment scientific commonsense, we are in the realm of the uncanny; if they contradict these laws, we have entered the realm of the marvelous. Only when the reader hesitates between these two alternatives are we in the realm of the fantastic.1 But the problem with the application of this schema is that we cannot assume that the same “laws” of commonsense reality are always operant in other cultures or during other historical periods. Robert Campany proposes that the strange may be understood as whatever arouses amazement by being anomalous with respect to a writer’s or a reader’s 1 Todorov, 1970, 41-52. 2 expectation.2 This is still not a perfect definition, but the key point that Campany insightfully proposes is that the strange is a cultural construct and a psychological effect, rather than a natural category. Secondly, how are we going to approach the texts? Is there reason to take everything in the texts as aspects of actual life at the time of writing? Or are these narratives better seen as creations of the author’s own imagination, written in a metaphorical, ironic, or purely fanciful mode, intended to muse or inspire not by virtue of their mimesis but rather by their very distance from the familiar patterns of life? Lu Xun 魯迅3 and Kenneth DeWoskin4 treat zhiguai as the birth of Chinese fiction, while scholars such as Robert Campany, Glen Dudbrigde, Alister Inglis and Leo Tak-hung Chan regard zhiguai texts from different time periods more as reliable historical records of what people experienced and believed.5 Here, when applying the modern western dualism of fiction vs. history to Chinese literature, as Andrew H. Plaks has noted, one would have to admit that the demarcation is blurred in Chinese narratives, which may be said to lie in the transmission of known facts. According to Plaks, the necessary assumption of such transmission is that every given narrative is in some sense a faithful 2 Campany, 1996, 232-5. 3 Lu Xun, in A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, delineates the development of Chinese fiction from the early myths and legends, through the zhiguai stories of the Six Dynasties, the chuanqi stories of the Tang and Song, the vernacular short stories of the subsequent dynasties, and to the novels of the late Qing period. The perception of zhiguai being the birth of fiction is implied, though not explicitly stated. See Lu, 1973. 4 DeWoskin, in response to Victor Mair’s claim that Chinese drama and fiction would not have risen without intellectual stimulus from Indian philosophy and thematic borrowing from Indian sources, argues that traditional Chinese narrative has never lacked creative elements. See Mair, 1983, 1-27 and DeWoskin, 1983, 29-35. 5 Campany, 1996; Dudbridge, 1995; Inglis, 2006; Chan, 1998. 3 representation of what did, or what typically does, happen in human experience. In other words, in narrative transmission, the facts in question are true – either true to fact or true to life, despite the obvious untruths of hyperbole, supernatural detail, or ideological distortion. 6 To further clarify Plaks’s proposal, his claim that there is no clear line between history and fiction does not suggest that people in premodern China were incapable of or indifferent to what is true or what is false. The modern notions of fiction and history are only two idealized polarities on a continuum of narrative possibilities in which Chinese literature or literature in general is situated. Zhiguai is a type of literature that problematizes the clash of extremes, questions binary thinking, and introduces a crisis that generates a new epistemological framework. Thirdly, what critical advantage do we gain by establishing zhiguai as a genre of its own? What different epistemological scenario does it bring about? In the enormous body of western criticism on fantastic literature,7 there is an underlying but well- established distinction between fictionality and reality.
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