Introduction

This article is dedicated to the many colleagues both at my home institution and elsewhere in the U.S. and China for their encouragement and advice, and to my nuclear and extended family for their support and interest. I am, of course, deeply indebted to CHINOPERL Papers and its editors for showing me the unprecedented favor of allowing this article to take up so many pages in this journal, and to the hands-on staff at Dartmouth who were so instrumental in seeing this volume to press in so timely a manner. Thanks are also due to my home institution, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for facilitating release time from teaching duties during a portion of the time during which this article was written. A version of the fIrst half of this article has appeared in Chinese under my Chinese pen name, Lu Dawei ~*1*,in lin Ping Mei yanjiu ~*][tfjJiiJf% 4 (1993): 222-53. x Introduction Traditional Chinese fiction is full of references to oral performing literature.! It is surely conceivable that some of these references were included in order to lend verisimilitude to the fictional worlds described in these works of fiction. That is to say, the appearance of descriptions of the performance of oral literature in fictional works could perhaps be explained as a reflection of the real world that produced and consumed these works. If we were to argue that the sole purpose of the inclusion of these descriptions was to remind the reader of the real world and to persuade the reader to accept the fictional portrayal of that world as real, such a use of oral performing literature could be characterized as "realistic." If we were to argue further that these descriptions were included solely for the purposes of verisimilitude and literary realism, for their ability to signify the "real," we would be in the realm of what has been called "insignificant notation," "useless detail," or "circumstantial realism,"2 and these descriptions would provide relatively unmediated information on the role of oral performing 1 In this paper I am working with a very broad and inclusive definition of oral performing literature (shuochang wenxue ~~~)(~). The specifictypes involved include oral storytelling in prose (such as pingshu 3fZft:), prosimetric storytelling (such as daoqing mJfW), sung lyric and narrative verse (such as qu B±J), dramatic skits (such as yuanben ~JG*), and fullblown drama (such as chuanqi ~ ~). The only major categories of material that I have generally excluded, for convenience rather than on theoretical grounds, are declaimed lyric poetry of the shi ~ and ci ~~ genres, ci or qu whose transmission in the work of fiction is written rather than oral (an example is the use of ci and qu poems for the text of written love letters), and jokes. Although the performance aspects of declaimed poetry are not to be slighted, I still believe that they represent a slightly different class of material, but, in any case, the sheer number of instances of declaimed verse in certain types of Chinese fiction (such as caizi jiaren 7tr1:iA fiction) makes the inclusion of this category too unwieldy for the purposes of the present paper. Please also note that for the purposes of this paper, oral performing literature includes examples from all three of the so-called "foundational genres": lyric, drama, and narrative. 2 See Roland Barthes, "The Reality Effect," in Tzvetan Todorov, ed., French Literary Theory Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 11-17 and Jonathan Culler, Structural Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975),p. 193. CHINOPERL Papers No. 17, (1994)© 1994 by the Conference on Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. CHINOPERLPAPERS No. 17 literature in traditional Chinese culture.3 This paper, however, is concerned with "nonrealistic" uses of oral performing literature in traditional Chinese fiction. Although these nonrealistic uses include anachronisms, such as ostensibly Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) figures singing the latest hits of the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and unlikely events such as fictional characters trading arias with each other, by the word nonrealistic I intend to refer to all usages exclusive of the realistic kind outlined above. These nonrealistic usages range from content-oriented categories, such...