SOURCE: Bishop, John L. “Some Limitations of Chinese Fiction.” In Studies in Chinese Literature, pp. 237-47. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965.

[In this essay, Bishop discusses the difficulty of understanding and enjoying Chinese fiction from a Western perspective. Using the masterworks of the Western literary tradition as a standard, Bishop finds early Chinese fiction deficient in characterization, morality, and rationality.]

One wonders what the general reading public has made of the translations of traditional Chinese fiction which have recently appeared in bookstores, in several instances in paper-bound series usually devoted to up-to-date novels of violence and vampires. Chinese colloquial fiction before the coming of Western influences certainly contains enough of both murder and adultery to give the average reader a sense of literary familiarity; but the thoughtful reader must be puzzled by an undefinable inadequacy, by a feeling of literary promise unfulfilled, to which even the student of Chinese stories and novels must confess. Unconsciously conditioned as are we all to the premises and achievements of European fiction, we cannot fail to weigh this fiction of another culture in the same balance and find it vaguely wanting. In the following pages I intend to isolate several of the factors which contribute to our impression of disappointment upon reading those works which have long been a source of delight to the Chinese.

In doing so, I must admit to taking arbitrarily the fiction of the West as a standard against which to measure works in a wholly unrelated literature, a questionable procedure if used merely to arrive at a value judgment, but a justifiable method if used to localize and appraise the different development in comparable genres of two distinct literatures. Western fiction, moreover, has always displayed a vitality which makes it an eminent criterion, a vitality which has led to capacity for experimentation, variation and theorizing extending down to the present day. Not for a century at least has the conviction prevailed in the West that “a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it.” Once emancipated from the stigma of immorality, European fiction gradually became recognized as a justifiable form of truth, as valid as that offered by the historian, the philosopher or the painter. Henry James's defense of the art of fiction merely served notice on a state of affairs already brought about by the work of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Dickens.

With the recognition of fiction as a form of truth, the reader's concept of fiction shifted from the romance and the tale to the novel and the story. He now expects, however unconsciously, in such literary forms a writer's personal, consistent view of life, and he expects as a concomitant, a personal and consistent literary style. In other words, he takes for granted on the lowest level of his reading some degree of literary realism, some accuracy in the description of the behavior of human beings as individuals in conformity or in conflict with a plausible social environment, and on the higher levels of his reading he looks for some degree of philosophical realism by which the author's personal judgment of a social condition or of a human problem is made clear. The reader of fiction, then, unless he confines himself to the watered-down and sugar-coated imitations which inevitably swarm in the wake of those original works that appear like revelations, wishes not only to be diverted by “lies like truth” but to be edified by a personal vision of truth seen through the medium of lies or fictions. If we accept this concept of fiction, it seems to me that the traditional colloquial fiction of China is limited in two respects: the one a limitation of narrative convention, the other a limitation of purpose.

Perhaps one should not distinguish so boldly between style and content, between form and function. Recent criticism insists that what is to be said inevitably shapes the manner in which it is said. But the point I wish to make is that in the Chinese fiction we are discussing this integration is imperfect, that in fact, primitive narrative conventions were retained long after the narratives had begun to change in scope and purpose, and that new themes were forced into old molds to the detriment of the final product.

These primitive conventions stem from an earlier period when colloquial fiction was part of an oral tradition of literature. From scattered references in T'ang and Sung sources¹ and from descriptions of the two capital cities of the Sung dynasty,² it is clear that the marketplace storyteller was a common social institution with well-established traditions in those periods, if indeed, he has not always been a feature of Chinese urban society. Faced with the problem of entertaining an audience, constantly coming and going, illiterate yet shrewd as are those who rely on the evidence of things seen and heard, rather than read, he evolved in the course of time a narrative genre which solved that problem.

Drawing for his materials upon historical records, Buddhist and Taoist hagiographies, tales in the literary language, and even celebrated local scandals, he was guided by at least one common criterion,—sensationalism, either supernatural, murderous or sexual. These materials he elaborated, giving to the terse originals a wealth of naturalistic, but nonetheless fanciful detail, calculated to convince his auditors of the plausibility of what was inherently incredible.

The form in which these stories were presented to the listening public had several characteristic features. They were introduced by a prologue in which anecdotes and poems related to the theme of the main story were strung out until the audience reached profitable proportions. Poetry was frequently introduced into the recital, probably with musical accompaniment.³ Originally such verses may have had an integral function in the story; later they served as a commentary, a verification, a means of delaying a climax, or merely as an embellishment. The narrator felt free to intrude in his own person into the story, lecturing his auditors on some moral problem raised by the plot, answering questions which he assumed to be in their minds, even exhibiting to them some tour de force of narrative logic which they might have missed. Characters in the story were often made to recapitulate the plot for the benefit of late-comers in the audience. The narrative style relied greatly on the use of dialogue to advance the plot; and presumably such a style allowed the storyteller to differentiate speakers in a semi-dramatic fashion. Also close to theatrical technique is the manner in which the movements of characters are meticulously described, so that by recording their sittings, risings, bowings and the like, we retain a constant and clear picture of the scene. Lastly, the stories are limited in length to what the attention span of a listening audience might comfortably endure. In the few surviving examples where we have stories which were presented in two installments or hui, the break occurs at a point of high suspense in the plot and thus ensures the return of the audience at the next session. In general, these stories betray the narrator's concern with using such conventions with the highest degree of craftsmanship rather than any interest on his part in adapting the old or inventing new narrative devices to fit some particular story.

At this point I must confess that there are no verbatim recordings of a Sung storyteller's recital. The characteristics of his style just enumerated have been drawn from later written versions of his stories, versions which appeared in printed collections during the Ming period⁴ but which unquestionably existed in written form in Yüan and Sung times. What is of interest is the fact that during these centuries of development from an oral to a written genre, the oral conventions persisted to such a degree in versions designed to be read. With the conservatism characteristic of Chinese literature, these once functional literary devices have been retained as unessential literary clichés. As a sort of author's commentary on the story he is relating, their cumulative effect is to destroy the illusion of veracity which naturalistic plot details attempt to create; and the retention of such conventions has impeded the development of a realistic narrative technique toward its ultimate goal of producing an effect of actuality. Fielding's digressions on the prose epic in Tom Jones and Thackeray's more intimate intrusions into his novels have called forth similar criticism in the West.

So far I have spoken only of colloquial short stories as they have been preserved in the San-yen and other anthologies of the Ming period. While this genre was developing during the Sung and Yüan periods, the colloquial novel was also evolving by a process of accretion from groups of such short narratives, possibly combined with dramatic versions dealing with a common pseudo-historical episode.⁵ But the survival of conventions used by oral narrators is still evident in these novels. Prose is mixed with verse and dialogue is used extensively. Chapters, still called hui, usually end at a climax; and the reader is urged in a stereotyped formula to hear what happens in the next installment.

Probably the most notable influence of its early origins on the novel and one most disturbing to the Western reader is the heterogeneous and episodic quality of plot. In Shui-hu-chuan⁶ he is expected to follow a story involving 108 heroes, over a third of whom have a major role, and in San-kuo chih yen-i⁷ he must cope with the shifting fortunes and myriad adventures of the rulers and military leaders of three warring states. Not since the Arthurian romances and Malory have Western readers been entertained with such a plethora of characters and incidents within the confines of a single literary work. These accretive novels, then, retain the meticulous narrative style of their original materials, a style which is preoccupied with surface reality, presenting to the reader a clear visual picture of outward appearance and movement and a verbatim account of dialogue. In addition, the structure of their plots is marked by episodic variety, bound by a tenuous unity of historical or pseudo-historical theme.

In the subsequent fiction of the Ming period, writers of novels and short stories accepted the narrative conventions of the San-yen collections and the Shui-hu-chuan. Aside from an inherent literary conservatism, they probably had an added motive in doing so: the need for the literatus to conceal any connection with the vulgar literature. In an atmosphere where fiction in the colloquial language was considered almost a defilement of the long-treasured and esoteric art of writing, few members of the scholarly élite could risk being known as compilers of a version of popular fiction or as authors of a new specimen in any of its genres. Use of the collective, traditional style of the storyteller, therefore, served as an excellent means of preserving anonymity.

The result of this fact is, to the Western reader, a curious absence of personality in the style of such fiction, a monotonous preoccupation with “story” rather than with an individual mode of telling the story. Chinese fiction for this reason has no Cervantes, no Richardson, no Jane Austen, who, relying to be sure on the work of predecessors, nevertheless gave the literary forms they found at hand a turn in a new direction or added new depth of insight, even a new dimension to be afterwards associated with that form.

Chin p'ing mei,⁸ a novel written in the sixteenth century which is for the most part an original production by a single hand, illustrates this limitation. Its unknown author has taken a narrative form common among traditional short stories, the exemplary tale in which the ultimate penalties of a life of dissipation are presented by graphic illustration. He has, however, expanded this theme by tracing the spread of moral laxity within a large family unit and ultimately among more distant family connections. The originality of his work lies not so much in the novelty of this theme as in the magnitude of its illustration. By extending moral retribution beyond the limit of the individual sinner to the family and, by implication, to society as a whole, he has introduced an innovation into the genre of fiction. While to a limited extent the innovation is prepared for by the large canvas of social forces at work which Shui-hu-chuan presents, the earlier novel does not anticipate the masterly depiction of domestic life in all its complicated detail which is one of the principal attractions of Chin p'ing mei.

In style and narrative technique, on the other hand, Chin p'ing mei is indistinguishable from the fiction which precedes it. It continues quite naturally and without a noticeable variation in style from the Shui-hu-chuan incident which is its point of departure. Furthermore, a colloquial short story embedded in one of its later chapters⁹ is stylistically indistinguishable from the context in which it appears. In other words, Chin p'ing mei employs most of the inept narrative conventions of earlier fiction, except obvious intrusions by the narrator, and binds together a wealth of loosely related episodes, giving these a degree of homogeneity by its implicit unity of theme. To the Western reader its final effect of satiety with the carnal life is a result of an overwhelming accumulation of incident rather than of the careful selection of telling narrative details. Yet it is a testimonial to the fine craftsmanship of traditional narrative technique that, despite its wooden and impersonal style, the novel carries a high degree of conviction in its details and an irresistible impact in its entirety.

Multiplicity of detail, striving to reproduce the social macrocosm rather than to explore the human microcosm, appears to be a characteristic of Chinese fiction inherited from the accretive methods by which its prototypes evolved. It is the rare novel in Western literature—War and Peace, Proust, and Dos Passos come to mind—which attempts the panoramic social picture of Shui-hu-chuan, Chin p'ing mei or Ju-lin wai-shih.

Another characteristic of Chinese fiction disturbing to the Western reader is the mingling of naturalism and supernaturalism within the same narrative. Poe's requirement of unity of effect or impression within a single narrative has long prevailed in Western literature. If a novel or story is to be a fantasy, the reader demands to know this from the start and to have the tone of fantasy maintained consistently. His willing suspension of disbelief varies greatly in degree, if not in quality, when reading for example Vatek and Vanity Fair. The intervention of ghosts or deities into a perfectly mundane sequence of events disturbs not only his sense of illusion but his standard of literary propriety. When, on the other hand, he opens Hsi-yu-chi¹⁰ and begins to read of a rock which became pregnant and gave birth to a stone monkey, he is prepared to accept all of the delightful fantasies which follow.

It may be argued that to the society for which these fictions were written, there was no incongruity in the mingling of flesh and blood with ghosts and gods, and hence no violation of plausibility. But it is apparent that at least by Ming times a definite rationalism had begun to make its appearance in fiction. While the legendary story of exemplary behavior and supernatural marvels continues to be repeated, it is the love story or erotic narrative with a domestic setting in which creative effort is centered. Even in the material of the San-yen collections we can observe the process by which the love element in some tale of wonder has begun to be expanded with realistic detail until its length is out of all proportion to that of the matrix story and its naturalistic style out of keeping with its original context.¹¹Chin p'ing mei is an excellent example of this trend. Except at the end where the visions conjured up by the mysterious Buddhist priest point up the moral significance of a seemingly immoral story and except for the appearance of Wu Ta's ghost retained from Shui-hu-chuan, all marvels have been carefully suppressed, even where borrowed materials suggest their use.

The tendency toward rationalism in fiction can be seen very clearly in the anonymous preface to Chin-ku ch'i-kuan [Wonders old and new], a late Ming anthology of stories selected from the San-yen. The author of the preface felt that some explanation of the character ch'i for “strange” or “wonderful” in the title was needed. “Strange” to him means not the impossible but the unusual, not that which violates natural or human principles, but that which on rare occasions exactly conforms to them. Marvels to him are those paragons of constancy to the cardinal human virtues recorded in history and romanticized in popular fiction. In the preface he attempts to shift the focus of attention from the miracles and ghostly visitations in many of the stories to the exemplary heroes of a few of them. But his rationalization also implies that the newer, more naturalistic love story, recording as it does striking lapses from exemplary behavior, has in this type of “strangeness” a moral value.

But Chinese fiction, while partially developing a naturalistic method, never wholly accepts its obvious concomitant, a naturalistic and purely human view of life. Always behind the plausible interplay of human emotions, human acts and consequences, lies the assumption of supernal forces directing the ultimate fate of the characters. In the best of the naturalistic stories a high degree of coincidence has taken the place of supernatural intervention; but in many of these stories and novels the religious machinery is deliberately exposed at the end. When a character declares that a certain event is the result of karma, we are prepared to accept this as a social convention debased almost to a figure of speech and do not allow it to influence our understanding of the plot. When, however, the narrator himself concludes so excellent a story as “The Ring” in Ch'ing p'ing shan t'ang hua-pen with an explanation that the whole of the tragic sequence we have just accepted imaginatively as true, is really the result of bad karma stemming from previous incarnations of the two main characters; when he says in effect that the development of the tragic situation has all the time been wholly outside the power of the hero and heroine to control or alter, the Western reader feels that he has been imposed upon and tricked. In the same way he objects to being harrowed by the troubles of Tess of the D'Urbervilles while being told all along that they are merely a cruel jest on the part of the Immortals. Granted that karma is an alien belief in the West, I suspect that even the Chinese reader who may have accepted the explanation as religiously sound, will nevertheless, feel an aesthetic disappointment at its unnecessary use in such a literary context.

If the principle of ultimate motivation in Chinese fiction is ambiguous, its moral purpose is equally so. Much of its traditional narrative material is frankly pornographic or immoral in nature, and much of what remains is amoral inasmuch as it unconsciously pictures a world governed not by the moral order of philosopher or priest, but by the operation of blind chance. The onus of immorality by which fiction was traditionally regarded in China as detrimental to the morals of society, is, therefore, not entirely without justification. To circumvent criticism by Confucian officialdom, writers stressed the value of fiction as moral instruction and missed no opportunity to include homilies on the Confucian virtues and thus provide a specious pedagogic function which is wholly foreign to such literature. The result is a marked contradiction between the avowed and the implicit moral purpose which destroys that integrity we expect of good fiction.

In the matter of character portrayal, another contrast between Chinese and Western fiction is apparent. Both literatures attempt realistic portrayals of social types and the difference between them is one of degree. Both exploit dialogue as a means of differentiating character and caste. The novel of the West, however, explores more thoroughly the minds of characters, and long familiarity with this realm has made possible whole novels which are confined to the individual mind alone, such as those of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. But to the Chinese novelist, the mental life of his fictional characters is an area to be entered only briefly when necessary and then with timidity. For this reason, his ability to exploit one of the chief concerns of realistic fiction, the discrepancy between appearance and reality, is severely limited since he can rarely show us the sharp variance between what is said and what is thought.

The writer of colloquial fiction, in spite of his keen eye for movement and his sharp ear for the speech of daily life, is curiously deficient in description of manner which requires a constant and subjective identification with one's imaginary characters. Translators soon notice this lack in the invariable use of tao or yüeh to introduce all speeches. This non-committal “said” often leaves the ensuing speech utterly colorless or ambiguous in tone. When in English such a statement as “I am going” is given emotional color by the verb which follows; as “‘I am going,’ she grumbled;” “‘I am going,’ she insinuated;” “‘I am going,’ she sighed;” or “‘I am going,’ she screamed;” the Chinese narrator gives no hint of the emotion implicit in each speech beyond that which the speech itself suggests. As a result, even the racy, supple and vital dialogue, which is one of the strong points of colloquial fiction, sometimes has the quality of monotone to the reader conditioned to the subtle overtones suggested by the stage directions in Western fiction.

This limitation of psychological analysis—which is what in general terms it is—seems to be related to a social factor influential in the development of Chinese fiction, and that is the absence of an aristocratic-feminine tradition in this branch of literature. I think most historians of French literature would agree that the psychological perceptiveness of the French novel can be traced to the influence of Mme. de La Fayette and Mlle. de Scudéry as well as their many contemporaries. Certainly the bulk of English fiction from the seventeenth century into the nineteenth was the work of women—not those novels which are read today, but those which were widely admired at the time and which prepared the way for the work of Richardardson and his successors. Characteristic of this feminine and quite often aristocratic tradition is a preoccupation with minute analysis of emotions and probing of mental attitudes. In a wholly unrelated literature, one has only to think of the Genji monogatari¹² by Lady Murasaki for a strikingly similar example of psychological sensitivity in the work of a woman and one associated with a sheltered and highly sophisticated court circle.

Whether the Chinese civil service system, restricting the growth of a permanent aristocracy isolated from the world of action, or whether the absence of women writers in either the literary language or colloquial genres of fiction, are factors which can account for the psychological immaturity of characterization in novels, is a thesis I am not prepared to defend. As a theme for speculation and study, however, it would be of value in appraising the character of the Chinese novel. Any such speculation must take into account the one isolated specimen of psychological sophistication, Hung lou meng,¹³ and determine its relationship to the main stream of Chinese fiction.

From the preceding remarks it should be evident that the genesis of a realistic fiction in China and in Europe had many features in common: appeal to a lower class audience uninterested in a past classical tradition; material which in revolt to that tradition was earthy and sensational instead of intellectual and restrained; and a narrative style that was sensuous rather than symbolic, observant rather than contemplative. Yet in spite of the similar origins, Western fiction, freeing itself early from the odium of immorality and confining itself to the realm of mundane fact, was able to progress further in the chosen direction and explore possible byroads. Chinese fiction, on the other hand, constantly defending its right to exist, hampered by anachronistic materials and stylistic conventions, and unable to face frankly the direction in which it tended, traveled more slowly and fitfully along the same road toward realism until the influence of Western models began to be felt at the end of the nineteenth century.

In concluding, I hope my main intention has been clear. Despite the inevitability of a value judgment, that intention has not been to disparage a great tradition of fiction in China, but rather to further in the general reader an appreciation of its works in translation by suggesting what he must not expect of it. Understanding and accepting its unfamiliar conventions, he will find in its works much profit, diversion and an admirable craftsmanship in the art of storytelling.

Notes

1. Tuan Ch'eng-shih, Yu-yang tsa-tsu hsü-chi [Supplement to the Yu-yang miscellanea], 4: 11a in ts'e 56 of Hupei hsien cheng i-shu; Su Shih, Tung-p'o chih-lin [Literary remains of Tung-p'o], 6.

2. The principal descriptions are: Meng Yüan-lao, Tung-ching meng-hua lu [Memories of the eastern capital], 7b in ts'e 3 of T'ang-Sung ts'ung-shu; Nai Te-weng, Tu-ch'eng chi-sheng [The Wonders of the capital], 10a-b in ts'e 1 of Lien-t'ing shih erh chung; Chou Mi, Wu-lin chiu-shih [Hangchow that was], 6: 11a-12b, in ts'e 250-2 of Pi-chi hsiao-shuo takuan.

3. Many of the poems used are tz'u, a form originally associated with musical accompaniment. The narrator's cues to his accompanist before each poem have still survived in the text of one story, Ching-shih t'ung-yen, 38.

4. Ch'ing p'ing shan t'ang hua-pen [Colloquial stories from the Ch'ing p'ing shan studio] was compiled by Hung P'ien between 1522 and 1566; Ching-pen t'ung-su hsiao-shuo [The capital edition of colloquial stories] is of disputed compilation date but contains materials antedating the Ming period; Ku-chin hsiao-shuo [Stories old and new] with an alternate title Yü-shih ming-yen [Clear words to instruct the world]; Ching-shih t'ung-yen [General words to admonish the world]; and Hsing-shih heng-yen [Constant words to arouse the world] were edited and published as a series by Feng Meng-lung in 1621, 1625, and 1628 and are referred to collectively as the San-yen [The three yen].

5. A thorough study of the development of one such novel is Richard G. Irwin's The Evolution of a Chinese Novel: Shui-hu-chuan (Cambridge, Mass., 1953).

6. Translations: J. H. Jackson, Water Margin (abridged) (London, 1937); Pearl Buck, All Men Are Brothers (New York, 1937).

7. Translation: C. H. Brewitt-Taylor, San Kuo or Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Shanghai, 1925).

8. Translations: Clement Egerton, The Golden Lotus (London, 1939); Bernard Miall, Chin Ping Mei, The Adventurous History of Hsi Men and his Six Wives (abridged) (New York, 1938).

9. See John L. Bishop, “A Colloquial Short Story in the Novel Chin p'ing mei,” HJAS [Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies] XVII (Dec. 1954), 394-402.

10. Translations: Arthur Waley, Monkey (abridged) (New York, 1943); Timothy Richards, A Mission to Heaven (partial, with summaries) (Shanghai, 1913).

11. For examples, see Ku-chin hsiao-shuo, 1, 3, 38; and Hsing-shih heng-yen, 15.

12. Translation: Arthur Waley, The Tale of Genji (Boston, 1927-33).

13. Translations: H. Bancroft Joly, Hung Lou Meng or, The Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese Novel (partial) (London, 1892-93); Chi-chen Wang, Dream of the Red Chamber (partial, with summary) (New York, 1958); Franz Kuhn, Dream of the Red Chamber (tr. by Florence and Isabel McHugh, New York, 1958).