The Eternal Storyteller: Oral Literature in Modern China (review)

This edited volume is based on papers and performances at the International Workshop on Oral Literature in Modern China, hosted by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark, in August 1996. It is a kaleidoscope of ideas and approaches in the field of Chinese studies of oral performance and oral-derived literature. The workshop was joined by researchers from Europe, America, and Asia, as well as five master storytellers from China. The volume contains not only scholarly articles based on the workshop papers but also transcriptions and vivid pictures of the storytellers' performances. Thus, the book achieves its goal of not only presenting aspects of the world of Chinese oral performance in description and analysis but also bringing it to life.

The central thrusts of the volume are a search and a query: a search for a poetics of the vast corpus of traditional "storytelling and singing arts," known in Chinese as quyi; and a query for the rationale behind the long tradition's durability. The volume not only features recent studies that reflect the latest findings but, more significantly, works done by the early pioneers in the field of Chinese oral traditions, such as Boris Riftin, Chen Wulow, Vena and Zdenek Hrdlicka. The editor's introduction and John Miles Foley's "A Comparative View of Oral Traditions" open the volume. While the introduction provides general information about the workshop, Chinese storytelling tradition, and its modem studies, Foley's essay is extremely helpful in placing the Chinese studies in a comparative framework. Finding it a universal phenomenon in human societies, Foley sees oral tradition as a specialized, highly economical way of communication. Judging that the earlier orality versus literacy hypothesis advanced primarily by Walter Ong was a "necessary first step toward appreciating oral traditions in their diversity" (p. 19), Foley argues that oral traditions bridge the assumed gap between orality and literacy. Highlighting the interpretive power of "tradition," Foley advances his ideas on "traditional referentiality," developed in his book The Singer of Tales in Performance (Indiana University Press, 1995), as a poetics for oral traditions.

The rest of the book is divided into four parts. Part 1, "Historical Lines," takes up the question of Chinese storytelling from various historical perspectives. André Lèvy explores questions of why and how the earlier term for storyteller, shuohuade (literally, "tale-teller"), changed into the later shuoshude ("book-teller"). He Xuewei, in an effort to trace the origins of Chinese storytelling, lends support to existing theories about the close relationship between Chinese storytelling and Buddhism. This relation is based on two types of written sources of oral-derived characteristics, bianwen (transformation texts) and baojuan (precious scrolls). Lucie Borotová's piece takes an overlooked approach to the study of oral traditions, namely, the iconographic representations of entertainers in the Qing period (1644-1911). The well-known folklorist Duan Baolin deals with the history and prospects of storytelling in China. His view that the oral genres will continue to prosper in China is in contrast with Marja Kaikkonen's view, presented in the same section, that the traditional oral arts are faced with inevitable demise under the challenge of more modern entertainment and China's changing social environment.

Part 2, "A Spectrum of Genres," deals primarily with individual oral genres of quyi. Vena and Zdenek Hrdlicka provide a thorough report on a kind of small street theatre called lianhua lao (songs of the lotus flowers) that they observed in Beijing in the 1950s, a time when many foreign researchers could not work in China. Other papers in the section concern the folksong tradition in the Southern Jiangsu area, the singing materials written in the so-called women's script (nüshu) found in a southern Hunan region, as well as puppet and human opera.

Part 3, "Studies of Yangzhou and Suzhou Storytelling," highlights some of the most recent research on storytelling in Yangzhou and Suzhou. The essay by Susan Blader adopts John Miles...