what is Chinese literature?
There was a time when it was a fashion in the CompLit circles to discuss Chinese poetry, its translatability, and the few things people knew about it; I always considered those debates as the most picturesque examples of learned ignorance. Well, be that as it may, Chinese literature is one of the oldest in the world. The oldest collection of poetry, known as Shijing, dates back to 11th - 7th century BC. The famous divination text, I Ching (Yi Jing), or the Book of Changes, is born around 1000-750 BC. Around the same period, China already had texts as divers as exorcisms and treatises on administration. To make things more clear, there is a fixed canon of the so called Five Classics: I Ching, Shijing (Classic of Poetry), Liji (the book of ceremonial rites), Shangshu (Classic of History), the Spring and Autumn Annals (historical records of the province of Lu). That's not all. Apart of the Five Classics, there are also Four Books related to Confucianism, i.e. the Analects of Confucius, Mencius, the Doctrine of the Mean, and the Great Learning. Which is of course only the top of the iceberg, because under the Eastern Zhou dynasty (770-256 BC) there existed so called Hundred Schools of Thought. Daoist classics were almost as important as the Confucianist canon. A famous text dating from the 6th century, an example of early Chinese military science is the famous Art of War by Sun Tzu, often edited in the Western World in the collections of cheap universal classics.
In the following centuries, each of the main strands of written tradition has its own evolution path. There is historiography, with detailed court records. There is a vast domain of classical poetry, divided into various strands, such as shi (plain / general poetry with its typical five-character lines) and fu (erudite rhyme-prose). There was also yuefu (folk songs). Inside shi poetry, various genres were defined by the topics described; there was a (wild) landscape genre and a farmland genre, etc. All those types and genres of poetry evolved between the end of the Han Dynasty (220 AD) and the subsequent Three Kingdoms period.
The Tang Dynasty (618-907) is regarded as one of various Chinese golden ages of poetry. The typical form of this period is the quatrain (jueju) progressing, in a quite condensed way, by couples of images or thoughts per line. Inside this form there is a distinction of free style (gutishi) and more regular, tonal style (jintishi). Those typically Chinese styles contrasted with ci poetry, reflecting the influence of the musical styles of Central Asia that became the typical expression of the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Just to give the general idea, the majestic, classical poetry of the Tang Dynasty contrasts with more expressive and metrically varied poetry of the Song Dynasty.
The novelty of the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) is qu poetry and the Chinese opera (a specific type of musical theatre). The qu poems are written according to set tone patterns, based on tunes of songs; so they make part, as sanqu, of a larger opera performance.
By the end of the Chinese middle ages, poetry is thus a transversal form of expression, connected to music on the one hand and to visual arts (calligraphy) on the other. It becomes the apanage of a large educated class, involving also women. Poetry competitions are a frequent form of socialising. Discussing poetry from a critical point of view (f. ex. according to the Tang versus Song division) is also an intellectual activity that goes on for several centuries.
The development of various types of prose has been already signalled. A novelty of the Song Dynasty in this domain is the novel formula of youji wenxue (travel record). The most famous example of the genre is Su Shi's Record of Stone Bell Mounatin. It is a daytrip essay, a short form aiming at a persuasive presentation of a philosophical or moral argument rather than any lengthy, detailed description of a journey. Su Shi discusses the problem of the factual accuracy of the ancient texts concerning stone bells.
The 14th century brings about the development of the vernacular, i.e. non-courtly fiction, dealing with a greater variety of topics. It will give rise to the Chinese novel, exemplified, in the 18th century, by the Dream of the Red Chamber, by Cao Xueqin, also called the Story of a Stone. It is an intricate, extensive story of the rise and fall of a family written between 1740 and 1764; its longest edition spreads over some 120 chapters. The general plot speaks of a sentient stone who wishes to experience mundane life. So it is taken by a Taoist priest and a Buddhist monk into the capital, where two wealthy families live. The aristocratic youths, linked by friendship and rivalry, are interested in finding an ideal woman (in total, 12 beauties will be identified). Finally, after many chapters filled with elegant life, the Jia clan falls into disfavour with the Emperor.
Apart from those great novels, there are also smaller genres of crime fiction (gong'an), supernatural tales, historical narrations, travels, etc. A great variety of literature.
The modern period emerges during the late Quing Dinasty (1895-1911), marked by an intellectual ferment and a sense of national crisis. the revolutionary tendencies that seem so typical for the 20th-century China come to the fore in the New Culture movement (1917-1923). It is a period in which, almost for the first time in its history, China starts to seek for solutions outside its own culture; it is a great moment of translations into Chinese. There is also a movement seeking for a new language in poetry. The 1920s and 1930s also mark the emergence of spoken drama (rather than the popular Peking opera). The League of Left-Wing Writers promote a highly politicised literature, adopting the Soviet doctrine of social realism.
Honestly speaking, China appeared on our horizon with contemporary novels, presenting relatively smaller translatability problems and lesser bulk. What keeps the western reader apart from the classical Chinese prose is the sheer size of the volumes, comparable only with the interminable Japanese cycles, derived from the same tradition.
In the following centuries, each of the main strands of written tradition has its own evolution path. There is historiography, with detailed court records. There is a vast domain of classical poetry, divided into various strands, such as shi (plain / general poetry with its typical five-character lines) and fu (erudite rhyme-prose). There was also yuefu (folk songs). Inside shi poetry, various genres were defined by the topics described; there was a (wild) landscape genre and a farmland genre, etc. All those types and genres of poetry evolved between the end of the Han Dynasty (220 AD) and the subsequent Three Kingdoms period.
The Tang Dynasty (618-907) is regarded as one of various Chinese golden ages of poetry. The typical form of this period is the quatrain (jueju) progressing, in a quite condensed way, by couples of images or thoughts per line. Inside this form there is a distinction of free style (gutishi) and more regular, tonal style (jintishi). Those typically Chinese styles contrasted with ci poetry, reflecting the influence of the musical styles of Central Asia that became the typical expression of the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Just to give the general idea, the majestic, classical poetry of the Tang Dynasty contrasts with more expressive and metrically varied poetry of the Song Dynasty.
The novelty of the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) is qu poetry and the Chinese opera (a specific type of musical theatre). The qu poems are written according to set tone patterns, based on tunes of songs; so they make part, as sanqu, of a larger opera performance.
By the end of the Chinese middle ages, poetry is thus a transversal form of expression, connected to music on the one hand and to visual arts (calligraphy) on the other. It becomes the apanage of a large educated class, involving also women. Poetry competitions are a frequent form of socialising. Discussing poetry from a critical point of view (f. ex. according to the Tang versus Song division) is also an intellectual activity that goes on for several centuries.
The development of various types of prose has been already signalled. A novelty of the Song Dynasty in this domain is the novel formula of youji wenxue (travel record). The most famous example of the genre is Su Shi's Record of Stone Bell Mounatin. It is a daytrip essay, a short form aiming at a persuasive presentation of a philosophical or moral argument rather than any lengthy, detailed description of a journey. Su Shi discusses the problem of the factual accuracy of the ancient texts concerning stone bells.
The 14th century brings about the development of the vernacular, i.e. non-courtly fiction, dealing with a greater variety of topics. It will give rise to the Chinese novel, exemplified, in the 18th century, by the Dream of the Red Chamber, by Cao Xueqin, also called the Story of a Stone. It is an intricate, extensive story of the rise and fall of a family written between 1740 and 1764; its longest edition spreads over some 120 chapters. The general plot speaks of a sentient stone who wishes to experience mundane life. So it is taken by a Taoist priest and a Buddhist monk into the capital, where two wealthy families live. The aristocratic youths, linked by friendship and rivalry, are interested in finding an ideal woman (in total, 12 beauties will be identified). Finally, after many chapters filled with elegant life, the Jia clan falls into disfavour with the Emperor.
Apart from those great novels, there are also smaller genres of crime fiction (gong'an), supernatural tales, historical narrations, travels, etc. A great variety of literature.
The modern period emerges during the late Quing Dinasty (1895-1911), marked by an intellectual ferment and a sense of national crisis. the revolutionary tendencies that seem so typical for the 20th-century China come to the fore in the New Culture movement (1917-1923). It is a period in which, almost for the first time in its history, China starts to seek for solutions outside its own culture; it is a great moment of translations into Chinese. There is also a movement seeking for a new language in poetry. The 1920s and 1930s also mark the emergence of spoken drama (rather than the popular Peking opera). The League of Left-Wing Writers promote a highly politicised literature, adopting the Soviet doctrine of social realism.
Honestly speaking, China appeared on our horizon with contemporary novels, presenting relatively smaller translatability problems and lesser bulk. What keeps the western reader apart from the classical Chinese prose is the sheer size of the volumes, comparable only with the interminable Japanese cycles, derived from the same tradition.
I have readMo Yan, 莫言 | The Change (2010)
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I have written... nothing ...
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have you ever read a Chinese book? |
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China corresponds to some sort of antipodes of humanity for me. In a way, this must be true, I presume, for more than just me. Chinese culture became strangely vulgar before we could achieve any degree of familiarity with it. It seems omnipresent in cheap Chinese products, some of them culturally marked, but even so, transmitting only the most superficial of all cultural meanings: luck-bringing dragons or rats of the Chinese horoscope. Certainly, we eat Chinese food, occasionally see a Chinese film with some sort of fight going on most of the time, but did we ever read a Chinese book?
I have a vague recollection of having read a Chinese book as a teenager. It was a Polish translation of the autobiography of Huineng, the sixth patriarch of Zen, when I was practising Zen myself. I must have been 17 years old or so at the time. Later on, I tried to read a Chinese book when I was interested in eroticism; that was Plum flowers in a golden vase, and I found it singularly anti-arousing (which is only natural, since the book, as I learned later on, was designed as a social satire; the omnipresence of sexual intercourse on every single one among several hundreds of its pages – I could read perhaps the first fifty before it became intolerable – was merely a symbol of generalised chaos that the author pretended to depict and criticise). Finally, the first real Chinese book I read was The Change by Mo Yan, the Nobel Prize winner in 2012. Soon after, I started reading One Man's Bible by Gao Xingjian, yet another Chinese Noble Prize winner. I never finished this book, but progressively I started to notice the gap, the white territory on my world map, the void corresponding to China, that for a long time was for me the most inhuman among human cultures, the most oppressive, also the most aggressive, the most bloody, the most uncivilized among civilizations. I suppose that such a negative stereotype of China is not entirely of my own making. There is also a linguistic aspect of the problem. Just like a vast majority of people, I don't speak Chinese. But for me it means something that it does not for the majority: it is the only global language I ignore so totally and absolutely. I might not speak Hindi, but at least I have some lights of it, I might be able to read the letters (if I happen to remember); I tried to learn it on several occasions along my life. I must know tens, if not hundreds, of Indian cultural keywords, such as avatar, advaita, artha, purana, puja. Nothing of that is valid for China. When I was in France, I found an abandoned Chinese grammar and a book of exercises in Chinese writing; but I never went as far as the Lesson 1. In contrast, my familiarity with Japanese culture, history, and even language is incomparably greater. Why is Japan so perfectly integrated in my intellectual and spiritual horizon, while China remains so desperately out of it? I'm seeing one of those martial arts movies that seem to be a frequented gate leading into Chinese culture. The one I had since many years at home, without ever caring to actually see it, is The Hero directed by Zhang Yimou. Nearly all of it is in the visual beauty: large quantities of silk, swords, flying drops of water, also large armies contrasted with the solitary encounters between single couples of warriors, that often happen to be – again, to increase the beauty of the picture – male and female. The story narrated is very simple, or it may be lost in the translation I could access. It is a story of remote beginnings, even before the construction of the Chinese Wall; it is a myth suspended in illo tempore. Only two kinds of art, closely related, seem to occupy the minds: calligraphy and fighting with swords, that seem as ductile as pens. The sequence is not truly that of events, but rather that of colours; love and death fill the background. But what does this film tell me about China? I suppose it does transmit a narrow selection of central cultural concepts: the search for mastery, the sense of hierarchy and power, a particular relation to time, culminating in condensed, crucial, decisive moments that overweight flat periods of sheer duration. I suppose these key concepts are interrelated; the emperor is worth the life of millions, just as the decisive moments are worth the countless moments contained in unfulfilling duration. There is love in all this, but only as a sort of counter-value, destined to destruction. Just as man is destined to destruction in one of those culminating moments. |
Chinese New Year celebration in Lisbon. 2015.
