A Drum Tale on “Wu Song Fights the Tiger”

CHINOPERL Papers No. 27 (2007)©2007 by the Conference on Chinese Oral and Performed Literature, Inc. A DRUM TALE ON “WU SONG FIGHTS THE TIGER” Vibeke Børdahl (Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen) For Kate This essay is written in honor of Kate Stevens, who opened the door to Chinese storytelling for me. The occasion was a performance of Beijing drum singing (Jingyun dagu 京韻大鼓) at the Shaoyuan dormitory of Peking University in 1984, arranged by Kate for friends and colleagues and people around (such as myself, a student at Shaoyuan). This was not only my first experience of drum singing, but of Chinese “tell and sing” (shuochang 說唱) arts, as such. Later, when I had occasion to meet Kate Stevens again in 1989 in China and in 1999 in her home in Victoria, Canada, she generously shared her scholarship and friendship, for which I am deeply indebted to her. In the following we shall take a close look at a drum tale entitled Jingyanggang Wu Song da hu 景陽崗 武松打虎 [Wu Song Fights the Tiger on Jingyang Ridge] and try out the analytic approach used for the core texts of my larger project, a study of “Wu Song Fights the Tiger” in Chinese storytelling.1 I regard the storyteller’s art, not as essentially ‘derived’ from the novel Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳 [Water Margin],2 but as a parallel tradition, which was already well developed 1 I gratefully acknowledge the assistance offered by Yu Jing 喻京, Feng Yining 馮一 宁, and Huang Ying 黃瑛 in transcribing and drafting translations for the project “Wu Song Fights the Tiger in Chinese Storytelling.” The texts listed in the Appendix appear as scanned originals, along with character transcriptions and English translations, on the website www.shuoshu.org; this material forms part of the Database on Chinese Storytelling, created in collaboration with Jens Chr. Sørensen. I wish to thank Kirsten Thisted for inspiring conversations on ‘orality and literacy’ during our stay at the San Cataldo institute in Italy, November 2004, where this study took shape. I am also grateful to Kathy Lowry and Margaret Wan for their comments. The Norwegian Research Council Program for Cultural Studies has given funding to the project. 2 For this approach, see for example Chen Wulou (1990: 32–33). Duan Baolin documents the complexity of oral and written sources for the Wang School of CHINOPERL Papers No. 27 62 at the time when the novel took form.3 In a society where the themes and heroes of Water Margin were living in popular culture, the individual tales were transmitted in a wealth of oral genres, some of which were also sooner or later written down. The constituents of a tale like the tiger story would be assembled by the storytellers from their orally inherited art (from their master), but also augmented with details invented or learned from other oral as well as written genres that were current in their own time. In the Wu Song project the main focus is on the linguistic form of the tale, in written, semi-oral and oral sources, old and new. My aim is to show the intertextual relations among a number of “instances” of the tale, both as words of performance (oral texts)4 and as words of written texts. Thus my project considers a broad synchronic and diachronic framework, encompassing oral performances on tape, CD and videos, as well as written texts, including novels and dramatic versions—a collection that will never cease expanding. Focusing on the drum tale in the framework of this project, implies a double aim: 1) to bring out the special linguistic and narrative form of the drum tale as an instance of the ‘Wu Song and tiger’ tale; 2) to bring out the contrastive linguistic and narrative patterns that become apparent by comparison with other “instances” representing the three main genres where this tale is found: novel, drama and performed arts.5 The overall aim of the project, including this particular study of the drum tale, is to explore the interplay of oral and written culture in China. Yangzhou storytelling and demonstrates the idea of Shuihu zhuan as a turning point for the development (1990: 72–75, 86). 3 See the account by the...