From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative (review)

THE COMPAnATIST BOOK NOTES SHELDON HSIAO-PENG LU. From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics ofNarrative. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. xii + 214 pp. Those who write books on Far Eastern literatures face an almost impossible task. Ifnot addressing specialists, they must assume that readers will know little about the society, culture, and history involved. Attempts to include such information can turn parts ofthe book into encyclopedia articles. To discuss the literary texts, it is helpful to cite Western analogues, and as a result the specialist should also be a comparatist. In view ofthese obstacles, we can only be grateful for any attempt to make those literatures accessible to us. From Historicity to Fictionality begins with a chapter on uses of the terms "narrative," "history," and "fiction" in the Western tradition, followed by one that treats the distribution ofthese concepts in Chinese thought. To put it briefly (and crudely), we encounter atradition in which history (shih) was the basis ofpolitical legitimation and hence ofsupreme importance. As a content-based category, rather than a narrative genre, history included "political documents, popular stories, biographies , geographical works, anecdotes ..." (47). Within this scheme, hsiao-shuo (street gossip, minor discourse, trivial explanation), an early form ofwhat we would consider narrative fiction, was often classified as a kind of defective history, although it might also be treated as a division ofphilosophy. Other kinds ofwriting that were tributaries to the narrative stream included the chih-kuai (records of anomalies, from the third to sixth centuries) and the biographies contained in histories . To impose our categories on this complex textual fabric is at best misleading. The third and fourth chapters treat the dominant modes ofhistorical interpretation , which Lu refers to as "the historical reading ofnarrative" and "the poetics of historiography." Stemming from early comentarles on the Spring andAutumn Annals of Confucius, the first mode tries to reveal "the hidden dimensions ofmeaning ," the ethical and philosophical principles underlying the literal level. The second mode sticks to the literal sense, what really happened, assuming that meaning is sufficiently evident in the facts. Lu's description ofthese methods is confusing, perhaps because they overlap more than he admits. But two exegetical techniques are clearly operative here. One ofthem tries to supply whatever facts are missing, to complete the referential picture, so to speak. The other, which can loosely be called allegorical, sees an event as an exemplum, through which principles can be discerned. Complicating this scheme is a disagreement about the relation ofsigns (natural and "mental") to reality and to principles. Different modes ofinterpretation are brought into focus in Lu's chapter on the supernatural and fantastic biographies (ch'uan-ch'i) of the T'ang dynasty (618907 ). By representing tales ofthe unusual as factual accounts, through the addition of personal testimony and verisimilitude, writers might incorporate pseudobiographies in official histories. The so-called allegorical mode of interpretation could tolerate dubious stories, so long as they exemplified a worthy ethical principle . Tales oscillating between the real and the imaginary—the fantastic, as Tzvetan Todorov describes it—also occur in T'ang fiction. Another important generic disVcH . 20 (1996): 199 BOOK NOTES tinction, that between classical and vernacular tales incorporating commentary by the narrator, here receives too little treatment. The last chapter treats the eventual acceptance of fiction as a narrative category, in the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties (beginning in 1368). A "Postscript" summarizes recent trends in the criticism of Chinese literature and makes suggestions concerning its future. Readers who do not know the dates ofChinese dynasties should have them at hand when reading Lu's book. As a non-Sinologist, I find "Traditional Chinese Fiction Criticism," in How to Readthe Chinese Novel, edited by David L. Rolston, invaluable forbackground information. Andrew Plaks's "Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative," in Chinese Narrative, which he edited, is also useful. For the comparatist and the narratologist, the parallels between Western and Chinese commentary on fiction between about 400 and 1700 are astonishing. They include the marginalization of"fiction," the classification ofnarrative within philosophy (as exemplum or enthymeme), and the coalescence of short vernacular forms to constitute the novel. The defense of fiction as something different from truth or falsity appears at about...