Western Han: A Yangzhou Storyteller’s Script ed. by Vibeke Børdahl, Liangyan Ge (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Western Han: A Yangzhou Storyteller’s Script. Edited and translated by Vibeke Børdahl and Liangyan Ge, with editorial assistance by Wang Yalong. Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series, no. 139. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2017. x + 742 pp. 14 illus. Cloth £150. Western Han consists of a reproduction in color facsimile of an entire storyteller manuscript together with a facing printed reproduction of the script, an Englishlanguage translation, a lengthy introduction, scholarly notes, bibliography and index. With this sumptuous volume, thanks to the efforts of Vibeke Børdahl and Liangyan Ge, the scholarly world will have for the first time the opportunity to explore in depth a script used by a practitioner in a Chinese storytelling tradition. In addition, the English-speaking world will now be able to enjoy a popular narrative about this dramatic era of Chinese history, when the unified empire of the Qin is about to collapse and a new dynasty is emerging. The original manuscript belonged to Dai Buzhang 戴步章 (1925–2003) and is believed to date back to the period 1880–1910. Most of this script was written by one hand (unknown) with additions made later by Dai Buzhang. The latter are reproduced in blue font on the printed rendition. One of the editors, Vibeke Børdahl, a specialist in Yangzhou storytelling, was given the manuscript by the family of Dai Buzhang, shortly after his death. The storyteller script is a most exciting find, with important implications for future studies of the interaction between orality, literacy and written fiction in a Chinese context. Throughout the twentieth century, since the publication of Lu Xun’s history of traditional Chinese fiction,1 scholars of Chinese popular literature have speculated about the nature of the relationship between professional storytelling and the emergence of Chinese vernacular fiction. A major point of contention has been the role of hypothetical “storyteller scripts,” regarded as a potential point of mediation between the oral performance and the published fictional text. In the early 1980s, Patrick Hanan completed an in-depth investigation of the sources of the stories in the famous Sanyan series of vernacular short stories by Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574–1646). He found that many stories were in fact rewritten from similar tales in the classical language. Nonetheless, there were a number of cases where the story material, verse stanzas and common motifs appeared to derive from a previous oral tradition.2 Liangyan Ge has demonstrated how such recurrent narrative patterns point toward the influence 1 Lu Xun 鲁迅, Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilűe 中国小说史略 (A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, first published 1925; modern edition Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2009). 2 See particularly Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Short Story (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 37. 1 (July 2018): 75–93 of oral traditions on much of the material in Shuihu zhuan and other early vernacular texts.3 Another point of debate was the origin of the so-called “storyteller’s manner” in Chinese vernacular fiction, a type of rhetoric where the narrator adopts the guise of a storyteller talking to an audience. While this appears to be a remnant of storytelling , on further investigation one finds that the storyteller’s manner is a feature of later more sophisticated fiction associated with literati authors and editors.4 In other words, the elaborate storyteller’s rhetoric of much vernacular fiction can be seen as an artistic device rather than simply a transmission from a storyteller’s prompt-book or similar. The above studies were completed in the absence of detailed information about the types of texts professional storytellers may have relied on or employed.5 In some performance traditions one could indeed find scripts (for example, plays of exorcism, shadow puppet theater, amateur Kunqu opera, Beijing drum singing), however, the general consensus was that professional storytellers learned their craft primarily through oral transmission and the observation of actual performance .6 With the opening up of China to scholarly exchange from the late 1970s, it became possible for Western scholars to investigate contemporary performance culture. Vibeke Børdahl was one of the first Western scholars to conduct field-work in a Chinese storytelling tradition of the contemporary...