The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Department of Comparative Literature LITERARY HUMOR AND CHINESE MODERNITY: THE ADAPTATION AND TRANSLATION OF SHAKESPEARE, WILDE, AND SHAW A Dissertation in Comparative Literature by Yuk Sunny Tien © 2012 Yuk Sunny Tien Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2012 The dissertation of Yuk Sunny Tien was reviewed and approved* by the following: Thomas O. Beebee Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and German Dissertation Co-Adviser Chair of Committee Alexander C.Y. Huang Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese Dissertation Co-Adviser Co-chair of Committee Shuang Shen Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese Martina Kolb Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature On-cho Ng Professor of History, Religious Studies, and Asian Studies Linda Woodbridge Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Women’s Studies Caroline D. Eckhardt Professor of Comparative Literature and English Head of the Department of Comparative Literature *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School ii ABSTRACT This study explores how English humor has manifested itself in modern Chinese culture, by focusing on Chinese adaptations and translations of the works of William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw. Issuing from contemporary time and space, adaptation demonstrates an emerging new sense of self in its negotiation of identity in the translational process. There are plays that fuse comedy and tragedy, or laughter and tears, but adaptation allows us to see how comedy can be transformed from tragedy, through changing perspectives and the distance or detachment created by time and culture. The adaptation and translation of bawdy humor represents a site of implicit censorship. New constraints, however, also bring new comic creativity and encourage different ways of thinking and speaking about what is supposed to be “forbidden.” The employment of specific local and provincial dialects has also become an important marker of the comic imaginary. Different dialectal strands that make up literary texts and film or stage productions offer a new perspective from which to look into the formation of identity at various levels. Further, when the translation of a comedy is adapted to be performed, what is involved is the intersection and collaboration of verbal and visual humor, as well as the dynamic between the character in a text and the role actualized by an actor on stage. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 The Comic Transformation of Shakespeare’s Plays ......................................................................21 CHAPTER 2 Humor, Translation, and the (In)visibility of Bawdy Puns ............................................................67 CHAPTER 3 Pygmalion, Comedy, and the Adaptation of Speech Variety ......................................................109 CHAPTER 4 Translating Society Comedies: The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere’s Fan .................................................144 EPILOGUE ..................................................................................................................................187 WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................190 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to express my gratitude to my academic advisors, Professor Thomas Beebee and Professor Alexander Huang, who have supported me in so many ways over the past seven years. I am immeasurably grateful to Professor Huang, who has provided me with guidance and expertise and has expanded my vision to new facets of literary and performance studies. I am also deeply thankful for Professor Beebee for his advice and encouragement, as well as his insightful comments on my dissertation chapters. Many thanks to my dissertation committee members, Professors Martina Kolb, Shuang Shen, On-cho Ng, and Linda Woodbridge, who have been extremely supportive and have helped this project reach completion. In addition, I wish to acknowledge the teachers in the Department of Comparative Literature, who gave me inspiration and offered their valuable time to the discussion of my research. This dissertation would not have been completed without the encouragement of my friends and the love of my family. I thank my parents and my three sisters for their patience and understanding. A special thank to Siu-pong Cheng for his wonderful sense of humor, which has helped me overcome numerous difficulties. Lastly, my thanks for the support of the Department of Comparative Literature and the financial support of The Pennsylvania State University, which has made this research possible. v INTRODUCTION The first part of this introductory section includes a description of the background and themes of the present study, followed by an evaluation of issues surrounding the field of adaptation theory in connection with fidelity, intertextuality, and subjectivity. The second part provides a brief description of the four chapters and outlines the specific research questions to be discussed in regard to the negotiation of literary humor between the Chinese and Western cultures through adaptation and translation. The study of adaptations could help us to consider the concept of “original” from a different perspective, or to account for the idea in a more precise manner. What kind of intertextual links can be traced to the previous practices and events? How and why are they related in certain ways? The identity of modern China has been constructed in terms of its sufferings and reformation.1 According to C. T. Hsia, what distinguishes the country’s modern literature from its traditional canon is its obsession with China as a nation afflicted with a spiritual disease.2 The initiatives of modern Chinese theatre were also marked by a strong interest in tragedy. Tragedy was privileged over comedy, because the task of the New Chinese Theatre is to strengthen the Chinese mind, and the way to achieve this goal is the creation of a tragic theatre.3 This preoccupation of Chinese literary and theatrical conventions with national suffering has marginalized the humor in the culture, an equally important force in the formation of modern Chinese identity. The argument goes that political development in modern China appears to be a serious subject and thus its literature is devoid of humor. 1 Alexander Huang, A History of Modern Chinese Humor (Book Proposal Manuscript, 2009), 1. 2 Hsia Chih-tsing, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1999), 533-534. 3 Wang Ban, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), 66. 1 It is a one-sided view, however, to assume that comic narrative is an insignificant or minor genre in modern Chinese fiction and drama. The neologism “幽默” Youmo (“Humor”), a homophonous translation of the English word “humor,” which emerged in the May Fourth period (1919-1930s), was emblematic of a progressive modernity. It gained greater currency and became popular after Lin Yutang started his humor magazine “論語” Lun yü (“Analects”), in 1932, which featured a regular youmo column.4 Lin and others valued youmo in the respect that the Chinese word “滑稽” Huaji, which means merely “trying to be funny,” was inadequate in modern times.5 To Lin Yutang, the introduction of humor is beneficial, if not crucial, to the modern spirit of the Chinese, and it functions as a means of constructing Chinese modernity.6 The large-scale rewriting, translation, and circulation of foreign comic writings, films, and dramas throughout the first half of the twentieth century occasioned an unprecedented internationalization of Chinese comic discourse. Comic works from the Chinese literary heritage were reinterpreted in relation to foreign ideas and sensibilities, notably those of English literature, which was sometimes filtered through Japanese renditions. Creating and defining China’s comic cultures became a transnational and comparative enterprise. Recently there has been increasing effort to chart the processes of how Western literature expanded the vocabulary and grammar of literary humor in the context of Chinese modernity. For instance, Christopher Rea’s dissertation A History of Laughter: Comic Culture in Early Twentieth-century China (2008) reconstructs how comic cultures flourished in China during the first half of the twentieth century and shows how these cultures have been integral to the affective, aesthetic, and political dimensions of modern 4 Ranbir Vohra, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974), 95. 5 John Diran Sohigian, “Contagion of Laughter: The Rise of the Humor Phenomenon in Shanghai in the 1930s,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 15 (2007): 139. 6 Qian Suoqiao, “‘Youmo’ (‘Humor’) As an Aesthetic Attitude,” Liberal Cosmopolitan: Lin Yutang and Middling Chinese Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 148-159. 2 Chinese literary and cultural practice. Drawing on different primary sources such as cartoons, stage plays, films and advertisements, the topics he covered include the late Qing mass media culture of joking, the visual turn of