Collecting the Self: Body and Identity in Strange Tale Collections of Late Imperial China (review)

Sing-chen Lydia Chiang's Collecting the Self: Body and Identity in Strange Tale Collections of Late Imperial China is an insightful and erudite study of the three most celebrated zhiguai (tales of the strange) collections of the Qing dynasty: Pu Songling's (1640-1715) Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange tales from make-do studio), Yuan Mei's (1716-1798) Zi bu yu (What Confucius wouldn't talk about), and Ji Yun's (1724-1805) Yuewei caotang biji (Notes from the studio of reading between the lines). Considering the collection and presentation of strange tales as a means of collecting and constructing a literati self, this study combines theoretical insights with masterful close readings of individual tales. It makes important contributions to research on the tale of the strange, Chinese narrative in general, the question of self-representation and identity in Chinese literature, and the uncanny as a theme in world literature.

Chiang's study is commendable first for its determination to consider these collections as wholes. Collections of strange tales include a great quantity and diversity of content, often with apparently random arrangement, creating a challenge for organized scholarly analysis. Many previous studies have focused either on a particular motif or on famous individual stories. Inevitably Chiang, too, is forced select particular stories to discuss in detail, but she places these examples in a rich context of prefaces, literary antecedents, the author s writing in other genres, and even painted portraits. She turns the challenging generic nature of these collections into a strength of her study: their diverse content allows for exploration of the multiplicity of the self. The self is not only collected but also dispersed (p. 9).

A crucial critical question in the analysis of these collections, which claim to record stories heard from a variety of informants, is whether they should be read as collections of oral folklore representing shared cultural ideas about the strange or the product of individual literati authorship. Chiang's emphasis is on the latter. Using critical approaches to collecting drawn from museum studies, she argues that regardless of the stories' provenance, their collection, arrangement, and presentation reveal the authorial self. She thus takes a sophisticated and persuasive approach to the problem of "transmission" and "creation," which has long dogged the study of the Chinese classical tale. Because of this emphasis on the authorial self, one unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable?) question is to what extent the concerns with the uncanny, the grotesque, and the problematic nature of the self that she attributes to these three authors are shared by the tellers and listeners of strange stories outside literati circles.

These three collections are the conventional choices for the study of the Qing strange tale. The Liaozhai is the most famous example of the genre. The Yuewei caotang biji, although a distant second to the Liaozhai in literary importance, is frequently compared to it, and its author is one of the most prominent literati of his generation. The Zi bu yu seems famous largely because of the reputation of its author, Yuan Mei, but it has received the least scholarly attention of the three. In any case, although the choice of collections may be conventional, Chiang's approach is highly innovative, exposing dimensions of all three that have been overlooked.

Chiang's introductory chapter presents her theoretical foundation, the literary history of the genres and generic terms covered by the study, and the historical context of the three writers she discusses. Theoretical conceptions of collection have been applied to the genre of the strange tale with illuminating results before, most notably in Robert Ford Campany's Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), which studies an earlier period in the history of the genre. However, Campany's interest is primarily in cosmography and persuasion...