Out of the Margins: The Rise of Chinese Vernacular Fiction (review)

The Shuihu zhuan (Water Margin, also known as Outlaws of the Marsh) occupies a unique position in the history of the traditional Chinese novel, having in many respects paved the way for the flourishing of the genre. One of its contributions to the genre is its significant role in the development of a literary vernacular. In Liangyan Ge's formulation, "It is in Shuihu zhuan . . . that vernacular prose extends to an unprecedented length and the degree of vernacularity ascends to an unprecedented level" (p. 4). Indeed, scholars of the May Fourth generation have foregrounded the novel in the oral performative literature, tracing its genesis to professional storytellers in urban centers—hence its "popular" nature in composition and message and its stature as a monument of literature by the masses and for the masses.

In the past three decades, however, this view has been challenged and revised: novels like the Shuihu zhuan are increasingly regarded as representative of "literati novels." It is now recognized that the literati class played a vital role in the production and consumption of these works, which achieved a marked degree of sophistication. Ge discusses the two approaches in chapter 2 (pp. 58-63). In this book, he revisits the issue of orality in the process of vernacularization of novelistic discourse and the development of a literary vernacular. "We cannot read [the Shuihu zhuan] adequately," he argues, "unless we take into account the nuances and complications in the circumambient actuality of the original oral communication" (p. 145). This truly multidimensional, interdisciplinary study does not discuss orality for its own sake; Ge foregrounds his study in a much larger context, particularly the interaction between the oral and the literary, the performance centers of storytellers and the desks of the literati, incorporating stylistic and linguistic analysis, sociohistorical analysis, the issue of orality and its relationship to literature, the psychology of the storytellers and their audience, and practical criticism, among other topics, into a compellingly argued book. The author handles all these components adroitly. Ge is successful in striking a balance between orality and textuality by emphasizing the literati's bearing on the text: the Shuihu zhuan "is . . . both an orally derived narrative to a great extent and a work conceived by a literary sensibility" (p. 63). Ge's study is a new reading of a masterpiece from the standpoint of popular orality, a reading that has yielded much insight into the intricacies of this work. The author's discussion of the Shuihu zhuan as "the earliest vernacular novel wrought by the long-term orality-writing interplay" (p. 6) has brought the discussion of an important aspect in the evolution of the Chinese novel as a genre to a new level of sophistication.

Out of the Margins is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 discusses the characteristics and roles of literary Chinese and its vernacularization prior to the Shuihu zhuan, as manifested in popular performative genres and works associated with storytelling, thus contextualizing the book within the larger social and literary history: "Shuihu zhuan set the pace for the development of the new literary genre, the vernacular novel, which was to completely change the landscape of China's narrative literature for centuries to come" (p. 35). Chapter 2 focuses on the process of vernacularization in the Shuihu zhuan, drawing on official history and oral performative genres and the narrative's textual history. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the assessment of the novel by traditional commentators and Western critics.

Chapter 3 goes on to elaborate on "how the narrative's connection to the oral tradition is reflected textually in the work" (p. 65), culminating in an insightful discussion of some recurring patterns in the Shuihu zhuan and other works. Further, the author traces this form of repetition to the psychological imperative of the storytellers and their audience. Chapter 4 elaborates on the process of textualization of an orally derived narrative, drawing...