In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

43 CHAPTER TWO The Nature of (Chinese) Fiction I have examined a number of historical and ideological factors that have contributed to the complexity of Chinese fiction study, such as Confucian disparagement ,the dominance of historiography,the conflation of early writing forms,and the problem of self-conscious fictionality.Because of these factors,the true nature of Chinese fiction has been shrouded in a mist of conceptual ambiguity. I think that we need to shift perspectives. Not only does xiaoshuo need to be liberated from the tyranny of historiography, but fiction theory needs to be emancipated from the dominance of related discourses. Rather than restricting the discussion of xiaoshuo as a literary genre to its relation to historical and philosophical writings , we ought to enlarge our horizons and examine the concept of fiction in its own right. There is in the history of Chinese literature a historical/narrative inertia that holds back the development of Chinese fiction, and Chinese xiaoshuo had to fight this inertia in order to gain full development into an art form. The motivating force that has transformed xiaoshuo into modern fiction is a drive toward pure fiction.Without this drive,Chinese fiction would still have remained a form of historical narrative or storytelling, and would not have been able to make the aesthetic turn to a full-fledged verbal art.The historical inertia has also adversely affected the study of Chinese fiction up to the present day.In practically all extant studies on Chinese fiction, the dominant paradigm is grounded on a historical perspective. In this chapter, I will not abandon the historical approach in its entirety, but will employ it to complement an analytic approach. Instead of trying to isolate fictional elements from a circumstantial perspective, I will first formulate a workable definition of fiction and use it as the yardstick to identify that which makes a narrative a fictional work and to locate landmark works that have contributed to the full maturity and artistic achievement of Chinese fiction. A D EF I N I T I O N O F F I C T I O N The catchall category xiaoshuo seems to suggest that there is no conceptual equivalent to the modern concept of “fiction”in early Chinese history. Does this mean 44 CHINESE THEORIES OF FICTION that fiction in the modern sense of the word did not arise until very late in China? This seems to be the widely accepted scholarly consensus. In chapter 1, I critiqued Wen Yiduo’s view on the origins of Chinese fiction. His view was held by a number of renowned scholars of his time and enjoyed enthusiastic support by later scholars. In 1983, Victor Mair revisited the issue and wrote a provocative article, “The Narrative Revolution in Chinese Literature: Ontological Presuppositions.” It became the central contention in a forum on Chinese fiction. In the article, Victor Mair employs comparative evidence on “Dunhuang transformation texts” (bianwen 敦煌變文) and Indian philosophical thinking to support a claim that has been made by a number of renowned Chinese scholars, including Wen Yiduo, Ch’en Yin-ko, Hu Shih, Ch’en Shouyi , and others: the introduction of Buddhism into China exerted a tremendous influence on many intellectual aspects of Chinese culture; and in the field of literature, Chinese drama and fiction would not have arisen without the intellectual stimulus from Indian philosophy and thematic borrowings from Indian sources.1 What is new and daring in Mair’s study is his argument that “there is virtually nothing before the T’ang period that can properly be designated as ‘fiction’ (that which is feigned or imagined)”2 and his contention that the introduction of fiction from India was the driving force for a virtual revolution in Chinese narrative. Mair’s view has been contested explicitly or implicitly by a number of scholars. It was directly challenged by Kenneth J. Dewoskin in his article “On Narrative Revolution,” the thesis of which goes diametrically against that of Mair. Dewoskin argues that “invention—fiction writing—was an essential, perhaps the essential, mode of narrative in pre-Tang China, contrary to Mair’s thesis that early narrative was intended (italics in the original) to be precisely and factually historical and became fictional only by rare (and regrettable) lapses in the discipline of factual recording.”3 Taking issue with Mair’s narrow definition of “fiction” and his narrow focus on available evidence, Dewoskin concludes that “the revolution in narrative was not primarily a large...

Share