Sound Rising from the Paper: Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination by Paize Keulemans (review)

Sound Rising from the Paper, the title of Paize Keulemans's monograph, derives, as the author informs us (p. 3n3), from a comment in the Yuan Wuyai 袁無涯 edition of Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳): zhishang chu sheng 紙上出聲. The phrase might also be translated as "sound arising from the paper," or "the page gives voice." In any event, it is a felicitous choice for the title of this work, in terms of both content and source. The notion of paper giving voice aptly encapsulates the negotiations between the written word and oral/aural culture that constitute this study's chief concern. This instance of a late Ming elite commentator's attempts to guide readers' response to Water Margin's presumably popular provenance and arguably unorthodox content engages associated, though distinct, questions about the social contexts of literature and about the intersecting roles of readers, texts, and cultural gatekeepers in producing literary meaning.

The subtitle, Nineteenth-Century Martial Arts Fiction and the Chinese Acoustic Imagination, is more problematic—not because of any inaccuracy. Keulemans recognizes the fact that the English term "martial arts fiction" is an approximate rendition at best of the Chinese wuxia xiaoshuo 武俠小說, and more importantly, he is aware of the misperceptions potentially attendant upon use of this expansive modern term to refer to the historically specific body of texts at the center of his study. Perhaps more accurate for these texts would be the term "novels of chivalric justice and court cases" (xiayi gong'an xiaoshuo 俠義公案小說), even though, like "martial arts fiction," it is a label created by the modern critical industry—this one produced in Beijing at the end of the nineteenth century. Granted the necessary evils of the term "martial arts fiction," Keulemans's study does in fact deal with a recognized body of texts that can be referred to as "nineteenth-century martial arts fiction."¹ And the various questions and concerns through which Keulemans approaches these texts are aptly subsumed under the rubric of the "acoustic imagination." My concerns with the subtitle have only to do with the most likely response from the book's potential audiences, and, more broadly, with the difficulties attendant upon writing about genre fiction. By labeling it a study of "martial arts fiction," Keulemans risks, on the one hand, attracting aficionados of the fictional genre (and of its ever more mainstream presence in contemporary audiovisual and gaming culture)—who may be disappointed by a study that is largely only indirectly concerned with representations and narratives of the martial arts as such—and, on the other hand, being overlooked by academics who might imagine its focus to be too narrowly genre-specific. "This study is not a genre study in the conventional sense," warns (promises?) Keulemans in his introduction (p. 23). While his objects of study and methodology are rooted in sinological traditions of philology and textual analysis, his work is informed by the field's recent increase of attention to print culture; it also resonates with the interdisciplinary growth of "sound studies."² He approaches these texts via the question of their various evocations of sound and voice, allowing him to discard critical assumptions that have previously walled these texts off from significant aspects of their literary, social, and material contexts. Keulemans thus makes fascinating and substantive contributions to our understanding not only of the genre but also of late imperial Chinese literature as a whole.

Until recently, genre fiction remained, at best, a denigrated subfield of literary studies—perhaps even more so in Chinese literary studies than in other areas of literary studies that were more eager to commit themselves to the assumptions of "postmodern" scholarship. Though allowed within the doors of the academy's "halls of elegance" (daya zhi tang 大雅之堂) during this pluralistic age, genre fiction has duly remained (to mix metaphors across cultures) in its place below the salt and rarely impinged...