Literary Quality of Qi from Tang Tales of Marvels to Wang Xiaobo's Tang
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Transgression in Texts: Literary Quality of Qi from Tang Tales of Marvels to Wang Xiaobo’s Tang Tales by Xiaowen Xu A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Xiaowen Xu 2014 Transgression in Texts: Literary Quality of Qi from Tang Tales of Marvels to Wang Xiaobo’s Tang Tales Xiaowen Xu Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto 2014 ABSTRACT The modern Chinese writer, Wang Xiaobo (1952-1997), retold three tales from the Tang dynasty (618-907) twice during the last two decades of the twentieth century. In this dissertation I examine the intertextual and intratextual relations between these tales and find that Wang Xiaobo’s efforts at literary adaptation belong to a long tradition of Chinese fiction writing in which the writer’s perceptions of the world are displayed through transformative experiments with language, genre, and reader’s expectations, experiments based on the pursuit of qi 奇 (“the marvelous”) in Chinese narrative literature. The literary quality of qi was first associated with Tang chuanqi 傳奇, or Tang tales of marvels. The Tang literati made use of shared literary knowledge in writing the Tang tales, and by engaging a literary spirit of you 遊 (“freedom of roaming”) in transgressing generic restrictions imposed by their classical education, they were able to present new perspectives on their own world. I argue that it is the pursuit of the literary quality of qi in Tang tales that makes transgression possible for the Tang literati in textual, generic, and thematic terms. ii Even though the literary quality of qi was domesticated and waned after the Tang dynasty, it persisted through the next twelve hundred years. I take an intertextual and intergeneric approach in analyzing selected texts by writers active in the centuries between the Tang literati and Wang Xiaobo, and find that writers who espouse the literary values of fiction help to preserve and enrich the literary quality of qi in their work. Wang Xiaobo continues the tradition of experimenting with shared literary and generic knowledge to achieve a sense of qi in his adaptations, adding to it a touch of postmodern irony. Wang Xiaobo revitalizes the literary power of qi as a means of two- fold transformation through which writing changes the writer, and reading changes the reader. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS While writing this dissertation I have incurred a multitude of debts of various sorts. The more material ones can be taken care of. The difficulty is with those debts of gratitude which can never be fully repaid. My greatest debt is to my supervisor, Prof. Graham Sanders. Prof. Sanders has been my supervisor from the first day of my Ph.D. program at University of Toronto, and his original research on Meng Qi’s works in fact ignited my interest in reading the Tang prose narratives that contain poetic lines. I have benefited from his graduate courses on classical Chinese poetry, and from his generous, insightful, and unwavering guidance through all these years. I am grateful to Prof. Linda Hutcheon beyond words. Prof. Hutcheon has followed my toils with invariable patience and support, reading, reviewing, and revising this dissertation at different stages of its conception, giving me instructive and constructive advice in addition to invaluable encouragement. Without her, I would not be able to theorize my thoughts into any presentable shape. I would like to thank Prof. Yue Meng, who kindly spent numerous office hours discussing with me ever since the first time I proposed my thesis, and her wisdom and knowledge in the field of modern and contemporary Chinese literature have been greatly appreciated. I would also like to thank Prof. Christopher Lupke, my External Appraiser, for his positive review of my dissertation and for his specific advice on how to develop this manuscript into a publishable book script. My special thanks also extend to Prof. Richard Lynn who introduced me to the literary beauty of classical Chinese language, to Prof. Hsiao-wei Wang Rupprecht who inspired me to read contemporary Chinese fiction, to Prof. Vincent Shen who led me to iv study Chinese literature from perspectives of Chinese philosophical thinking, and to Prof. Johanna Liu whose advice on critical thinking in terms of art theories has been a great help. I am also greatly indebted to Prof. Pierre Giordan whose knowledge of works by Shen Congwen has benefited me greatly. I would like to thank Dr. Li Yinhe, who generously shared with me her memory of Wang Xiaobo when I interviewed her in 2009. She provided me the publication information regarding Wang Xiaobo’s Tales of the Tang People and The Bronze Age that confirmed many of my speculations on the intratextual relations between these two works. I am also grateful for the support of Dr. David Chu Travel Grant which made this interview possible. I should also mention that I am deeply obliged to Prof. Allan Barr and Prof. Naoki Sakai, whose critical and encouraging responses to my presentations at two AAS regional conferences led me to explore into the research questions deeper in this dissertation. I would like to thank Dr. Spencer Morrison, who carefully copy-edited the draft of this dissertation just a few days before his own successful oral defence. I would also like to thank my husband, Qing Mei, and my two kids, Ruoyu and William, for having supported my pursuit of this time-consuming, nerve-wracking project without ever questioning its feasibility. Last but not least, I would like to thank my father, Xu Minduo, and my mother, Zhang Jingxia, for their support. I would like to dedicate this work, immature as it is, to my mother, for her endless love and her undaunted hope all the time. She gave me life, in every sense of the word. v Table of Contents Chapter I: Introduction 1 Chpater II: Tang Tales of Marvels: To Amaze the Everyday World with Qi 17 Chapter III: Qi Domesticated and Reduced 57 Chapter IV: Breaking the Bondage: Qi in Chinese Fiction of the 1980s and 1990s 92 Chapter V: The Tang People and Our Time: Qi in Wang Xiaobo’s Intertextual Travel 137 Chapter VI: Conclusion 210 Works Cited 216 vi List of Figures Fig. 1. Front Cover of Zhang Ailing, Chuanqi (Shanghai: Shanhe tushu company, 1947) Fig. 2. “Calamity will soon befall the Xie Empire” (燮國的灾難要降臨了) Fig. 3. Comparison of “Kunlun Slave” and “No.1-A Lixin Street and Kunlun Slave” Fig. 4. Chapter Beginnings in Looking for Peerless vii Chapter I Introduction A literary interest in the past characterizes the field of Chinese narrative fiction in the 1980s and 1990s, and among the many fictional narratives produced during this period, many display the writers’ perception over the bare events in the everyday world they live in. When a writer’s perception of these events appears as distinct from or even opposite to his/her reader’s surface impression of them, the writer’s words create for the reader a sense of fantasy. In this dissertation, by impression I refer to the superficial appearance of bare events that is seen through human eyes, and in contrast, by perception I refer to the more profound comprehension of those events through human imagination. This phenomenon in the Chinese literary field is not a new thing. It is indeed a revival of the literary quality of qi 奇 (the fantastic, the marvelous) in Chinese narrative literature. The Chinese character qi 奇 literally means the fantastic, and as a literary quality in narrative writing it was originally associated with Tang chuanqi 唐傳奇 in the Tang dynasty (618-907). In this dissertation I use “tales of marvels” to refer to chuanqi after consulting other scholars’ translations. The English term for Tang chuanqi has been various. Most scholars writing in English language choose to use the Chinese term’s English transliteration with a note to describe it. For example, James Hightower explains chuanqi as “transmitted marvels,”1 Karl S. Y. Yao describes it as “accounts of the extraordinary;”2 William Nienhauser, Jr. describes it as 1 James Hightower, “The Story of Yingying,” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 33 (1973) 90. 2 Karl S. Y. Kao, Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic: Selections from the Third to the Tenth Cenutry (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985) 1. 1 2 “transmissions of the strange, or transmissions of strange stories,”3 and Steven Owen describes it as “transmitting accounts of remarkable things.”4 Grahams Sanders both translates the term into English as “fantastic tales” and describes it as “transmitting the fantastic.”5 Precise are these descriptions are, they intend to cover all the tales in the genre. I choose to use “tales of marvels” to refer to chuanqi narrative mainly because such a term could best describe its aspect of transgression in everyday life, a feature that appeals to and inspires contemporary Chinese fiction writers such as Wang Xiaobo. While tales of marvels acquired formal maturity in the Tang dynasty, some well-known tales continued to be thought of as enduring and brilliant literary expressions of human fantasies. According to Lu Xun, “Fiction, like poetry, underwent radical changes in the Tang dynasty,” and these radical changes mainly were embodied in qi, a literary quality with which the Tang writers deliberately invented strange adventures in exquisite literary words. 6 During the Tang dynasty, however, tales of marvels made their debut more as a frivolous variant of official historiography. The extant texts of Tang tales preserved in literary collections record the narratives of the tales themselves, often with frame stories describing the occasions that prompted the writer to transcribe the tale (usually told orally as part of casual conversation), and sometimes the responses from the tale’s primary and immediate audience at the time of its telling.