On the Rise and Decline of Wulitou 无厘头's Popularity in China

The Act of Seeing and the Narrative: On the Rise and Decline of Wulitou 无厘头’s Popularity in China Inaugural dissertation to complete the doctorate from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Cologne in the subject Chinese Studies presented by Wen Zhang ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks go to my supervisors, Prof. Dr. Stefan Kramer, Prof. Dr. Weiping Huang, and Prof. Dr. Brigitte Weingart for their support and encouragement. Also to the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Cologne for providing me with the opportunity to undertake this research. Last but not least, I want to thank my friends Thorsten Krämer, James Pastouna and Hung-min Krämer for reviewing this dissertation and for their valuable comments. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................................... 1 0.1 Wulitou as a Popular Style of Narrative in China ........................................................... 1 0.2 Story, Narrative and Schema ................................................................................................. 3 0.3 The Deconstruction of Schema in Wulitou Narratives ................................................... 5 0.4 The Act of Seeing and the Construction of Narrative .................................................... 7 0.5 The Rise of the Internet and Wulitou Narrative .............................................................. 8 0.6 Wulitou Narrative and Chinese Native Cultural Context ........................................... 13 0.7 Key Notions and Chapter Outlines .................................................................................... 14 CHAPTER 1: WULITOU 无厘头: AN ABNORMAL STYLE OF NARRATIVE ................... 20 1.1 Why ----- “We Humans Love Story” ............................................................................... 20 1.2 “Wulitou”: an Abnormal Style of Narrative ................................................................ 28 1.3 The Popularity of “Wulitou” as a Style of Narrative ................................................. 58 CHAPTER 2: THE ACT OF SEEING, NARRATIVE AND MEDIA ......................................... 63 2.1 The Act of Seeing Before Narrative ................................................................................. 63 2.2 Seeing as an Act of Choice .................................................................................................. 65 2.3 Media and the Way of Seeing ............................................................................................ 68 2.4 The Popularity of “Wulitou” Narrative and the Internet ......................................... 70 CHAPTER 3: THE WAY OF SEEING CORRESPONDING TO “WULITOU” NARRATIVE ....................................................................................................................................................................... 76 3.1 The Spatio- Temporal Dimension of Seeing .................................................................... 76 3.2 The Way of Seeing Corresponding to Wulitou Narrative ........................................... 83 CHAPTER 4: WULITOU NARRATIVE AND POSTMODERNISM ......................................... 90 4.1 Premodernism, Modernism and Postmodernism .......................................................... 90 4.2 The Form designs of Typical Postmodernism Narrative .......................................... 116 4.3 Wulitou Narrative and Typical Postmodernism Style Narrative ........................... 125 4.4 The Cultural Context in China Around the End of 1990s ........................................ 128 CHAPTER 5: THE DESTRUCTION IN WULITOU NARRATIVE ......................................... 137 i 5.1 Schema and Archetype ......................................................................................................... 137 5.2 Wulitou: a Means to Deconstruct the Orders Between Things ............................... 145 5.3 The Carnival, Grass Root, Parody and Wulitou Narrative ...................................... 159 CHAPTER 6: THE DECLINE OF WULITOU NARRATIVE .................................................... 165 6.1 Another New Era ................................................................................................................... 165 6.2. From PC to Mobile Devices ............................................................................................... 175 6.3. Conclusion and Prospect .................................................................................................... 184 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................... 188 ii INTRODUCTION 0.1 Wulitou as a Popular Style of Narrative in China “床前明月光,疑是地上霜,举头望明月（啪！响木一敲）,我叫郭德纲。”1 (“So bright a gleam on the foot of my bed, could there have been already frost? Lifting my head to look, I found that it was moonlight (Pa! A sound of Ringwood knocked),My name is Guo Degang”) ---- These lines above are taken from the article by Mao Weimin’s 毛伟敏 and Wei Yu’s 魏雨 “Wulitou” You Laitou《“无厘头”有来头》 (The Original Meaning of Wulitou), as a typical example for wulitou. The Xiangsheng 相声(Peking talk show) comedian Guo Degang 郭德纲 recited the first three lines of the poem “Jing Ye Si” 静夜思 (In the Quiet Night) at the opening of his show, just to replace the last line of this famous poem with an introduction of himself by casually “chopping” off the original last line which reads “低头思故乡” (“Sinking back again, I thought suddenly of home.”), using the fact that his name fits in the rhyme scheme of the poem perfectly. When parts of the content (the first three lines in the quotation above) which is about a beautiful scene of moonlight seen and described by the famous poet Libai 李白 in Tang Dynasty of ancient China, and the self-introduction of Guo Degang himself (the last line in the quotation above), the two different things, are “brutally” placed together as it was done above, a wulitou 无厘头 narrative is thus created, and shows us the following most notable features which appear often in wultiou 无厘头 narratives: “dislocation” (in the quotation above, the link between the first three sentences and the last sentence goes off the normal causal/logic route); and “anachronism” (in the quotation above, a contemporary person’s self-introduction is “misplaced” in a scene happened in ancient China). A wulitou narrative generally contains a hefty dose of comedy, for the “dislocation” and the “anachronism” which appear in wulitou narrative can usually create a strong 1 Mao Weimin 毛伟敏 and Wei Yu 魏雨, “Wulitou You Laitou”《“无厘头”有来头》“The Original Meaning of Wulitou”, In “Yao Wen Jiao Zi”《咬文嚼字》(2006.07), P23-P24 1 comic effect. And as a special comedian style of narrative, the popularity of Wulitou 无厘头 is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and not-to-be-missed cultural phenomenon in China during the past 20 years or so. In 1990s, with the screening of Zhou Xingchi 周星驰 (Stephen Chow)’s wulitou films, wulitou developed from a Cantonese2 local saying into a widely accepted term to describe a type of humor or a style of narrative in the Chinese speaking areas; and then at the end of 1990s, being synchronized with the rise of the internet and the popularization of personal computers in China, wulitou entered into its heyday in China, rapidly became a buzzword and one of the most popular styles of narrative. Take for example a popular wulitou style web series in China from 2013-2015《万万没想到》(Unexpectedness), the data relevant to it shows: since it began to be broadcasted online in 2013 to the time when the first two seasons were finished in 2015, “播放量共计超过 20 亿” (“the play times of it has already totaled over 2 billion”)3; and in 2013 it was selected by the Chinese internet audiences as “2013 网络第一神剧” (“The Top 1 Chinese Web Drama in 2013”)4; in 2014 it got the accolade as “2014 最受大学生瞩目网络剧” (“The Most Attractive Web Series in 2014”) at the “2014 中国大学生电视节”( “China Student Television Festival 2014”)5. Through the use of “anachronism” and “dislocation”, wulitou narrative departs from the temporal, spatial, and causal patterns in classical narratives. “Classical design displays the temporal, spatial, and causal patterns of human perception, outside which the mind rebels.” 6 ---- Apparently, what Robert McKee says above is not applicable to wulitou narratives. As an abnormal style narrative, why can wulitou be popular in China? Or in other words, how should we interpret the popularity of wulitou narrative in China? 2 A variety of Chinese spoken in Guangdong and neighbouring areas such as Hongkong and Macau. 3 Xun Chao 荀超, “ ‘Wanwan Mei Xiangdao’ Huigui, Wang Dacui Zoushang Resheng Dianfeng”《<万万没想到>回归，王大锤走上人生巅峰》, 04, Nov. 2015, 《华西都市报》(West China City Daily), From http://media.people.com.cn/n/2015/1104/c40606-27773815.html 4 Luo Anji 洛安吉, “ ‘Wanwan Mei Xiangdao’ Pin Shenme Chengwei 2013 Wangluo Diyi Shenju?”《<万万没想到>凭什么成为 2013 网络第一神剧？》From http://news.mtime.com/2013/11/28/1521112.html 5 “Daxuesheng Dianshijie Bimu, Wanwan Zui Shou Daxuesheng Zhumu”《大学生电视节闭幕 <万万>“最受大学生瞩目” 》, 27, Oct. 2014, From http://hebei.ifeng.com/detail_2014_10/27/3066324_0.shtml 6 McKee, Robert (1997). Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York. P62 2 0.2 Story, Narrative and Schema Before we go further into discussion, it’s necessary to give a definition for narratives. In many cases the term “narrative” is taken as a synonym for “story”, for example,

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