The Columbia History of Chinese Literature by Mair Victor H.;

Author:Mair, Victor H.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism/Asian/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-12-24T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 36

TRADITIONAL VERNACULAR NOVELS: SOME LESSER-KNOWN WORKS

The era of the Ming (1368–1644) and Ch’ing (1644–1911) dynasties produced vernacular works of fiction on an unprecedented scale. Apart from the most famous Chinese novels such as the “four masterworks” of the Ming dynasty—San kuo chih yen-yi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), Shui-hu chuan (Water Margin, Outlaws of the Marsh, or All Men Are Brothers), Hsi-yu chi (Journey to the West, or Monkey), and Chin P’ing Mei (Gold Vase Plum, The Golden Lotus) from the sixteenth century—and the great Ch’ing dynasty novels Hung-lou meng (A Dream of Red Towers) and Ju-lin wai-shih (The Scholars) from the eighteenth century, Chinese writers created a variety of fictional narratives, some similar in scope and structure to the famous novels, others shorter or dealing with different themes.

The proliferation of vernacular novels in the late Ming dynasty in particular testifies to a burst of creative energy and activity. Such literary activities coincided with the expansion of cities and urban culture, bearing witness to the urban dwellers’ craving for entertainment and amusement. The use of the vernacular language or an idiom approaching the vernacular, as opposed to classical Chinese, made these works of fiction accessible to a wider readership. Their readership may have included not only the highly educated members of the literati elite but also literate merchants and women with some education and enough leisure time to devote to them. Many novels remain anonymous, but the authors would most probably have been scholars or officials, some higher up and others lower down the ladder of success in the imperial examination system for recruitment into the civil service. Their writings give voice to an era that today invites us to explore its many facets of literary creation.

ON A BROAD CANVAS: THE LATE MING WORLD IN FICTION

Marriage Destinies to Awaken the World

Hsing-shih yin-yüan chuan (Marriage Destinies to Awaken the World, Tale of Marriage Destinies That Will Bring Society to Its Senses, or The Bonds of Matrimony), a novel of manners from seventeenth-century China, appears to be one of China’s most underrated traditional vernacular novels. Its depiction of local society in Shantung province presents one of the most grand-scale explorations of the world in fiction. The action is set in the fifteenth century, but details and rhetoric refer to the time of writing in the seventeenth century.

The authorship of the novel has been wrongly attributed to P’u Sung-ling (1640–1715), Ting Yao-k’ang (1599–1669), and other famous seventeenth-century literati. The author remains anonymous. He reveals only his pen name, Hsi Chou sheng (Scholar of the Western Chou), an allusion to the Confucian Golden Age of the Western Chou dynasty (c. 1100–771 B.C.E.) in the legendary past.

The text betrays a familiarity with life in Shantung province and the capital, Peking, in the 1630s and early 1640s. The novel must have been composed sometime between 1628 and 1681, the transition period from the Ming to the Ch’ing dynasty. Modern scholars are not yet agreed whether the novel is a product of the Ming or the Ch’ing, but the text reflects voices and visions steeped in the late Ming world.

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