Appropriation and Representation: Feng Menglong and the Chinese Vernacular Story (review)

Within the Western-language scholarship on late Ming vernacular fiction, this slim monograph is rare in its almost exclusive focus on the Suzhou-based compiler and writer Feng Menglong (1574-1646), who has usually been the subject of articles and book chapters instead. Drawing on the American literary critic Michael Holquist's comments about the Russian narratologist Mikhail Bakhtin, Shuhui Yang argues that Feng Menglong has a great yet underestimated significance as a "ventriloquating" and sometimes "duplicitous" writer who usually expressed his feelings and ideas through personae in the 120 Sanyan stories (pp. 9, 25). According to Yang, Feng Menglong stands at the midpoint in the evolution of vernacular story production between the minimalist editorial approach of the Hangzhou literatus Hong Pian in the mid-sixteenth century to the highly personalized and inventive bent of Li Yu (1611-1680) in the latter half of the seventeenth century (p. 13). Yang goes on to provide interesting and often insightful close readings of such famous stories as "The Pearl-Sewn Shirt" (pp. 49-63) and "Du Shiniang Sinks the Jewel Box in Anger" (pp. 134-144). Finally, the author's inclusion of sinographs in both the book's index and its bibliography enhances its value to both faculty and graduate students, who would seem to make up the two major components of Appropriation and Representation's readership (pp. 171-187).

Shuhui Yang resembles certain traditional Chinese scholars in loosely ascribing "authorship" of the stories in the three Sanyan collections to Feng Menglong —however much he may qualify this claim with occasional quote marks and hedging (pp. 2, 153). In contrast, relatively meticulous scholars who are more conversant with the research on stylistic analysis and thematic patterns in vernacular Chinese fiction have characterized Feng as primarily an editor who himself wrote no more than thirty-six or thirty-seven out of the total of 120 Sanyan stories. In fact, Feng's personal contributions to the Sanyan tended to decrease throughout the 1620s, as he authored no more than one or two stories within the third and final Sanyan collection, Xingshi hengyan (Constant words to awaken the world).¹ The striking thematic and stylistic contrasts between the twenty-two stories by Xi Langxian in the Xingshi hengyan and the thirty-five stories by Feng Menglong in the earlier two Sanyan collections makes Yang's footnoted explanation for having entirely omitted Langxian from his evolutionary framework seem rather lame (p. 15). In Shuhui Yang's effort to magnify Feng Menglong's role in the authorship of the Sanyan stories as a whole, he has unfortunately obscured the findings of comparative stylistic and thematic analysis that reveal Feng's shrinking authorial footprint in the later Sanyan collections, especially the Xingshi hengyan.

Yang fares better in explicating the numerological motifs in "The Pearl-Sewn Shirt" and the literati preoccupations that connect China's poetic tradition with the Sanyan vernacular story, such as their common allegory of a neglected beauty for a neglected genius or out-of-favor scholar-official. However, for a full-length study of an individual writer whose literati sensibility is analyzed as crucial to our understanding of the Sanyan, this book seems to go out of its way to avoid mentioning salient biographical details. For instance, instead of summarizing Feng Menglong's long and winding path toward success in the examinations and in holding an official post from 1634 to 1637, Yang merely refers the reader to studies by Hanan and Ye Ru. Yang seems to overstate the hopelessness of Feng's career prospects when categorically proclaiming that there was "no official appointment anywhere on the horizon" as late as 1627 (p. 125). If Feng Menglong had felt so alienated during the 1620s in his "exclusion from the political center," as Yang alleges, why would Feng have laid down his life for the cause of Ming loyalism in 1646?

Although Yang is...