Luca Stirpe

HUANG MING ZHUSI LIANMING QIPAN GONG 'AN: A COLLECTION OF DETECTIVE STORIES HELD BY THE BEIJING AND TOKYO LIBRARIES

The gong'an literature

Anthologies of detective stories, known as gong'an 0~, occupy an extremely important position in the panorama of vernacular literature in the Ming period (1368-1644). If translated literally, the two characters used to identify the detective story genre, mean "legal cases of the public administration". In fact, this is how records of everything concerning the law, trials, sentences and the relative judicial acts, had been identified since ancient times. If we go on to explore other meanings of the term and precisely in reference to something linked to popular culture, we come across a work published in 1253, the Ducheng jisheng mt~ *c Mi (A Record of the Splendours of the Capital City) by Nai Deweng iffft t~ ~. This volume describes the attractions and amusements of Hangzhou, the capital of the Southern Song (1127-1279) and, in listing the various schools of story-tellers, actually mentions those who "narrate gong 'an " (shuo gong'an ~ 0 ~). Unfortunately, Nai Deweng supplies neither the titles of these gong'an stories nor gives us informationconcemingcharacter and content. Hence, we have to wait until the Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1277-1367), and even until the Ming Dynasty, for further enlightenment on the real meaning of the term. Two major sources can be traced to the Yuan period: one, the detective plays of the zaju ~ 'U theatre; two, the collection of professional story-tellers' texts entitled Zuiwengtanlu M ~ ~ ~ (Talks of the Old Drunkard), attributed to Luo Ye m'if, who· defines one of the eight schools of story-tellers as the "gong'an school". However, the detective story reached its height during the Ming Dynasty and, more particularly, in the Wanli f-it Iff period{1573-1619). Luca Stirpe

Since this narrative genre derives directly from huaben ~3" * literature', the detective stories are structured according to a number of criteria specific to oral narration. In performances given by story-tellers2, the show began with the recitation of a number of poems and brief anecdotes related to the main story, which served to introduce the theme to the audience but, above all, to delay the actual telling of the story until the entertainer felt that he had the attention of a sufficient number of people. At this point, he launched into the main story. The narration was partly in verse and partly in prose, recited with or without a musical accompaniment, usually a drum, and sometimes

I It is difficult to trace with any reasonable certainty the origin of the huaben, since scholars are still hotly debating one of the most crucial issues in vernacular literature. The studies and research carried out on the subject to date do not make it any easier to establish whether they were stories deriving from the preachings of itinerant Buddhist monks, and therefore imported from India during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and then "secularized" in China; plays with improvised dialogue or notes used by the story-tellers, or simply texts stemming from the legacy of Chinese oral legends and stories collected in written form for the first time, following the format actually used by the story-tellers who interpreted that same tradition. As none of the hypotheses can be confirmed, I shall date the origin of the huaben to the period of transition from oral literature to written sub literature, according to the three categories of "oral literature, written sub literature and recognized literature" defined by Levy, 1981, p. 12. The character hua gj5, in the sense of narrative, had already appeared in the Tang Period, while ben ;;$: in the sense of book or booklet first appeared in the Han Period (206 B.C.-220 A.D.). Whereas the union of the two characters first came to light during the Southern Song Dynasty (1l27-l279), in the already quoted Ducheng jisheng by Nai Deweng, in which the term huaben is used in descriptions of the shadow and marionette theatres. For the purposes of this essay, I shall use the following basic definition of huaben: a narrative text in prose that mayor may not contain parts in verse which constitute a whole without any specific divisions, written in the vernacular (Levy, 1981, p. 19). When we speak of huaben in the Song Period, we are inevitably obliged to consider in the abstract and to reconstruct, on the basis of conjecture and analogy, a literary reality of which there is no written evidence, except from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. I am in fact referring to the literary works that the Ming authors called huaben which, for a long time, scholars have erroneously considered as material dating to centuries previously. Whereas the general opinion now is that the original -Song huabrm were carefully revised and extensively reworked during the Ming Period, which made them completely different from the simple "prompt-books" kept by the story-tellers, to the point that they are now called imitation huaben (ni huaben • gj5 ;;$:). Nevertheless, the very fact that the Ming authors, consciously desiring to revive a literary tradition, considered them real huaben, and the evident similarity between the huaben and the "prompt-books" of the story-tellers with regard to composition, narrative techniques and the use of language, perfectly justifies a comparative reconstruction on the part of scholars.

1 See Hridlickova, 1965, pp. 225-248.

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