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Taiwan 2001 |
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Literature |
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An Outline of Traditional Chinese LiteratureTraditional Chinese literature can be divided into four periods: early antiquity, from the 12th century B.C. to 206 B.C.; middle antiquity, from 206 B.C. to A.D. 618; late antiquity, from 618 to 1279; and the premodern era, from 1279 to 1911. Early AntiquityThe literature of early antiquity includes the classics preserved from the Chou 周 dynasty and organized by Confucian scholars; the works of philosophers from the Spring and Autumn 春秋 period and the Warring States 戰國 period; the Songs of the South (Chu) 楚辭; and the early myths, which were compiled from various sources. Together, these works laid the spiritual foundation of Chinese literature and culture. Both the Book of Songs from northern China and the Songs of the South represent the fundamental dichotomy of Chinese poetry: realism and lyricism versus romanticism and imagination. The early myths are scattered among a number of works: chiefly, Chuang Tzu, the Mountain and Sea Classic 山海經, and the poem "Heavenly Questions" 天問 in the Songs of the South. These works had a fundamental influence on the way the Chinese people view the universe, mankind, nature, and civilization. From the Book of History tradition of recording the words of the early kings developed both the narratives of the historians and the speculative works of the philosophers. The most important works of history are the Spring and Autumn Annals of Lu, the Tso Commentary 左傳, and the Conversations from the States 國語. Corresponding to the recording of words in the Book of History is the recording of deeds in the Spring and Autumn Annals. This work records in concise language--often only a single sentence--major historical events in chronological order. It uses the method of "according praise or censure in a single word" to make penetrating ethical judgments about the events it relates. It is with the Tso Commentary and the Conversations from the States that narrative literature in China became fully mature, fusing the twin traditions of recording words and recording deeds. These works used the techniques of recording deeds and rendering ethical appraisals from the Spring and Autumn Annals as models for their treatment of narrative and subject matter. They also applied the technique of recording words from the Book of History in creating dialogs that illumined the psychology and motivations of characters to thereby depict and morally judge historical events. Thinkers of the ancient era prior to the third century B.C. not only made major contributions to the development of Chinese thought, but also had a lasting effect on Chinese aesthetics and literature. The effect of the Confucian thinkers is reflected in an emphasis on ethical, social, and political concerns. Taoist influence can be seen in a striving for transcendental, universal meaning, and in an awareness of an eternal, metaphysical significance of life beyond history and society, achieved through an appreciation and description of one's natural surroundings. The works of these ancient philosophers, through their method of illustrating morals through fables, established narrative models for characterization and plot development, which was a break from the recording of words and deeds of outstanding historical figures used in historical narrative. The various styles that evolved along these lines subsequently influenced the development of Chinese prose. The Analects of Confucius and Lao Tzu's Classic of the Way and Its Power 道德經 made terseness and profundity the foremost criteria of prose style. Mo Tzu 墨子 advanced the methods of logical exposition, while Chuang Tzu established the model of an exuberantly imaginative composite form that defied classification. Mencius made full use of the expressive powers of the spoken language in forging an eloquent verbal style. Hsun Tzu 荀子, in addition to being the first writer of Chinese fu 賦 (prose-poems), made full use of the isolating character of the Chinese writing system to develop a regulated aesthetic of parallelism and antithesis. All these works became sources and models for later literature, both spoken and written. Middle AntiquityThe major political development during the middle antiquity period was the conclusion of the feudal system of the Chou dynasty and the establishment of a stable, unified empire under the Han. In the area of philosophical thought, the effect of this development was the triumph of Confucianism; in literature, it was the independence of literature from philosophy, and a striving for formal aesthetics and emotional experience. Its first literary product was the Songs of the South, which was written as a prose-poem. The prose-poem is a literary form that is recited rather than sung. Tied less to musical form than poetry, the prose-poem combined visual and aural elements in its attention to formal rules and euphony. As its development came in response to the preferences and patronage of the emperor, its earliest subjects were invariably praise and glorification of the splendor of the imperial palace, the capital, parks, and hunting grounds. Out of this arose a tradition of exhaustive description, often accompanied by the coining of new Chinese characters, which catered specifically to the ruler's consciousness of possessing the empire, the world, the universe, and everything in it. Works of this type, which were presented to the emperor, are called ta-fu 大賦 (greater prose-poems). As writers came to realize that a consciousness of totality must be connected with a sense of individuality to have value and meaning, they began to experience anxiety over individual existence. Thus, "the scholar born out of his time" became a basic theme of the hsiao-fu 小賦 (lesser prose-poem). Chia I 賈誼 and Szu-ma Hsiang-ju 司馬相如 in the second century B.C., and Chang Heng 張衡 and Wang Tsan 王粲 in the second century A.D., were the most important writers of prose-poems, a genre that would continue to develop right up until the end of the 19th century. Shih 詩, or poetry of lines of equal length, was still identified with song when the Yueh-fu 樂府 (Music Bureau) was established during the reign of Emperor Wu Ti 武帝 (140-86 B.C.) in the Han 漢 dynasty. The amalgams of song and poetry produced then were generally referred to as Yueh-fu shih (Music Bureau ballads). Often originating from the common people, these pieces were rich in narrative content and filled with laments over social issues, especially the gap between the rich and poor, the posting of soldiers to distant regions, the plight of widows and orphans, and the vicissitudes of life and time. Poems that reflected social realities and contained a sharp consciousness of moral crisis continued to be created under the name of yueh-fu in later times. Although they were no longer set to music, they preserved the external form of early yueh-fu, with its lines of unequal length. Another literary development during the nearly 400 years of the Han dynasty era was the appearance of poems written in neat five- or seven-character lines that were unbound to music. It later became the universally acknowledged fundamental poetic form. The rules for matching and balancing characters in parallel constructions became increasingly refined, and ultimately resulted in the regulated verse of the seventh century onward. Middle antiquity can be considered the period of formalization of Chinese literary aesthetics. From the third century onward, the method of writing prose-poems was extended to the writing of essays, culminating in the blossoming of parallel prose in the sixth century. The five-character line 五言詩 form of poetry emerged after the period of the lesser prose-poem. Anxiety over life and death became a basic theme for this new poetic form as well. Representative examples are found in the Nineteen Ancient Poems 古詩十九首 collection of the first century, the most important work in this genre at the time. Finding consolation in Taoist thinking to dispel the cares of existence, poets gradually turned to the subject of fields, gardens, hills, and streams, discovering and reveling in the natural beauty of landscapes. The most important poets of this period were Tsao Chih 曹植, Juan Chi 阮籍, Tao Chien 陶潛, and Hsieh Ling-yun 謝靈運. Middle antiquity was also a fruitful period for the narrative tradition. First and foremost of the works in this genre was Szu-ma Chien's 司馬遷 Records of the Grand Historian 史記. Records, written during the first century B.C., was the first comprehensive work to recount China's ancient and recent history. It also established a model for historical writing centered around biography. Szu-ma Chien shifted the focus from unity of plot evident in the Tso Commentary and the Conversations from the States to a unity of character. His writing helped pave the way for the chuan-chi 傳奇 (classical tales) of the eighth and ninth centuries. Pan Ku's 班固 History of the Former Han Dynasty 漢書 was the first history devoted to a single dynasty. Pan Ku's work, together with Fan Yeh's 范曄 History of the Later Han Dynasty 後漢書, Chen Shou's 陳壽 Records of the Three Kingdoms 三國志, and Records of the Grand Historian, are traditionally considered the pillars of Chinese historical writing. Although its narrative roots can be traced back to Chuang Tzu, Hsun Tzu, and the Tso Commentary, Chinese fiction is often said to have begun its development under the nfluence of the romantic and supernatural adventures related in the biographies of diviners and imperial concubines in the Records of the Grand Historian. This genre, consisting of depictions of courtly affairs and supernatural occurrences, was referred to as chih-kuai 志怪 ("recording the strange") fiction. Among the earlier examples of this sort of fiction were the Private Life of Lady Fei-yan 飛燕外傳 and the Intimate Biography of Han Emperor Wu 漢武內傳, both written during the fourth century. Late AntiquityA milestone in the development of Chinese society was the establishment of the bureaucratic examination system in the seventh century. This system produced a new class of officials who played a leading role in society both politically and culturally. The literature of late antiquity was the activity and expression of this new class. Unlike the old aristocracy, the members of the new class owed their entrance to officialdom to success in the examinations. They had to form factions to avoid isolation, and when policies changed or power alliances shifted, they had to worry about demotion or exile. The effect of this situation was twofold. On the one hand, the new officials felt a strong sense of self-awareness as individuals, and did not identify solely with the family; on the other, they traveled widely throughout the country, whether in exile or in official service. As a result, the literature of late antiquity was characterized by a high degree of mobility, autobiography, and sense of regionalism. During the seventh through ninth centuries, examination candidates were tested in poetry, which led to the widespread development of that genre, whereas during the tenth through 12th centuries, they were tested in essays on public policy, which led to a flourishing of the literary language. The seventh century saw the refinement of regulated verse, in response to the needs of the examination system. Seventh through ninth century poetry generally strived for a consciousness of human existence through descriptions of natural beauty. Wang Wei 王維, Li Pai 李白, Tu Fu 杜甫, Pai Chu-i 白居易, Han Yu 韓愈, and Li Shang-yin 李商隱 were the most important poets of the Tang 唐 dynasty (which spanned the seventh through ninth centuries) and were also major figures in the history of Chinese poetry. The Sung 宋 dynasty poets of the 11th and 12th centuries introduced philosophy into poetry, and discourse and reasoning became important characteristics of their works. Tang and Sung poetry became the twin paradigms of Chinese poetry in later ages. Ou-yang Hsiu 歐陽修, Wang An-shih 王安石, Su Shih (Su Tung-po 蘇東坡), Huang Ting-chien 黃庭堅, and Lu Yu 陸游 were the major representatives of Sung poetry. The medieval era of the seventh through ninth centuries was a time of cultural fusion. Not only was there a melding of the contrasting cultures of earlier dynasties from the fourth through sixth centuries when China was politically divided, but the administration of the western regions and the reopening of the Silk Road led to the absorption and popularity of music and dance from Central Asia. The lyric 詞, a poem with lines of unequal length originally set to music, became the dominant poetic genre. Poems (shih) of the literati had by this time moved toward strict regulation (both in formal "neatness" and in tonal contraposition) due to the examination system, and had become increasingly alienated from the spoken language. The art of the lyric, on the other hand, was cultivated at banquets and entertainment activities among merchants and the common people. The lyric genre began to attract the attention of the literati during the ninth and tenth centuries, and by the 11th century, had become the second most important poetic genre among the literati. Due to the differing lengths of its lines and its origins among the common people, it preserved characteristics of the spoken language to a considerable degree. For poets of the Sung dynasty, the poem came to express the rational and public aspect of the writer's spirit, and the lyric, his emotional and private side. The most important lyricists were Wen Ting-yun 溫庭筠, Wei Chuang 韋莊, Feng Yen-szu 馮延巳, Li Yu 李煜, Liu Yung 柳永, Su Shih, Chou Pang-yen 周邦彥, Hsin Chi-chi 辛棄疾 and Chiang Kuei 姜夔. Another major literary development of late antiquity was the revival of the classical literary language, or ku-wen 古文. Pien-wen 駢文, or parallel prose, had been criticized as being beautiful in form but shallow in substance ever since the late sixth century. The reform of prose writing, however, did not occur until the mid-eighth century, when Han Yu and Liu Tsung-yuan 柳宗元 began to promote the classical literary language. Their models were Mencius and the Records of the Grand Historian. They ultimately succeeded in developing a new, more comprehensive style of writing that reflected the life of people outside the class of officials and returned to the tenets of Confucian thought as a main theme. This type of writing emphasized narration and argument, both of which became autobiographical and lyrical vehicles of expression by lending prominence to the writer as a subjective entity. The classical literary language acheved unprecedented success during the 11th century and became the main form of prose writing in China thereafter. Major writers in this genre during the Sung dynasty were Ou-yang Hsiu, Wang An-shih, Su Hsun 蘇洵, Su Shih, Su Che 蘇轍, and Tseng Kung 曾鞏. The career ups and downs experienced by the new class of officials inspired a narrative form that conveyed change. The form gradually encompassed social realities and human life, but was at the same time influenced by the chih-kuai genre of fiction of the fourth century onward, and the Records of the Grand Historian tradition that emphasized outstanding individuals. By the eighth century, this type of fiction was called the chuan-chi 傳奇. These stories often added elements of the mysterious and fantastic to everyday occurrences. Representative classical tales include Chen-chung Chi 枕中記 by Shen Chi-chi 沈既濟, Nan-ko Tai-shou Chuan 南柯太守傳 by Li Kung-tso 李公佐, Ying-ying Chuan 鶯鶯傳 by Yuan Chen 元稹, and Chang-hen-ko Chuan 長恨歌傳 by Chen Hung 陳鴻. The Premodern EraThe Mongolian invasion represented the end not only of the Sung dynasty, but also of the cultural patterns of late antiquity, which centered on a class of officials selected through the examination system. The imperial examinations were halted for some 80 years during the Great Mongol Empire, known in China as the Yuan 元 dynasty, and the social status of the Confucianists plummeted. Commerce and world-class cities, on the other hand, thrived in this age. This led to the growth of the entertainment industry and an unprecedented flourishing of vernacular literature aimed at the petty bourgeoisie. A vernacular narrative genre called pien-wen 變文 ("changed writing"), which was partly recited and partly sung, arose from the reciting of Buddhist sermons in temples from the seventh century onward. At the start of the 12th century, a form of chantefable involving a medley of tunes called the chu-kung-tiao 諸宮調 ("all keys and modes") was created. It was designed to be sung and narrated, and so was structurally organized around suites of poetic songs sung to popular tunes of the age. A work of oral storytelling, it was part of a professional storytelling tradition that developed around the ninth century, and was already highly popular in Pienliang and other cities during the 11th and 12th centuries. The most complete surviving example of this genre is available in English translation under the title Master Tung's Romance of the Western Chamber 西廂記諸宮調. The musical influence on plot structure inherited from the chantefable, combined with the verbal repartee of the yuan-pen 院本 genre of dramatic skits of the 11th century, formed the basis for the earliest known form of completely developed music drama in China, the Yuan tsa-chu 元雜劇, or Yuan Music Drama of the 13th century. Less than 170 complete examples of this genre have survived, with plots ranging from melodrama and crime to comedy and spiritual redemption. Among these theatrical works are intensely melodramatic works, such as Kuan Han-ching's 關漢卿 Injustice to Tou O 竇娥冤, Pai Pu's 白樸 Rain on the Wu Tung Tree 梧桐雨, Ma Chih-yuan's 馬志遠 Autumn in the Han Palace 漢宮秋, and Chi Chun-hsiang's 紀君祥 Orphan of Chao 趙氏孤兒. Most of the musical comedies were social satires, such as fantasies about scholars climbing the bureaucratic ladder, often through love and at the expense of merchants. One of the most influential romantic music comedies from the 14th centuries was the Romance of the Western Chamber 西廂記, traditionally attributed to Wang Shih-fu 王實甫, which had an enormous impact on the plot structure of later music drama and fiction with its popularization of the chia-jen tsai-tzu 佳人才子 ("Beauty-Scholar") motif. The literary heart and soul of all three of these theatrical forms--the chantefable, yuan-pen, and Yuan Music Drama--was a new kind of poetry called the chu 曲 (ditty), based on a new song form that appeared in northern China during the 12th and 13th centuries. The lyrics of the ditty also became an independent poetic form in their own right, originally sung to the tune of the ditty in a manner like the lieder settings of 18th and 19th century German poetry by Franz Schubert and other contemporary Viennese composers. The major difference was that these composers created music to match an already existing poetic text, while the 12th and 13th century Chinese ditty poets created text to match an already existing ditty melody. By the 14th century, the original northern ditty melodies were gradually lost, yet ditty lyrics were still successfully set to what succeeding generations preserved as their original tune matrix, and new music from southern China was ultimately created to again allow musical performance. A special characteristic of the ditty was that filler words could be freely added outside the fixed metrical pattern for euphonic effect. The metrical pattern itself was flexible within certain musically proscribed limits. This freedom gave the ditty a strikingly colloquial nature. Furthermore, several or even a score of ditties in the same mode could be combined into a ditty sequence 套數. Ditty writers in either music dramas or independent verses often flirted with the comic and risque, although nostalgic and angry ditties were also written. In addition to the Yuan playwrights who frequently wrote ditties outside the context of music dramas, major ditty poets included Chang Yang-hao 張養浩 and Chiao Chi 喬吉. Earlier kinds of poetry, such as the shih and lyric, were part of the fabric of vernacular fiction in its earliest manifestations, prompt books 底本, or hua-pen 話本. These seem to have arisen, either directly or indirectly, through the imitation of the oral storytelling tradition, whose roots extended back to the 11th or 12th centuries of the Sung dynasty. All three kinds of poetry played an integral role in short, medium, and full-length vernacular fiction until the 19th century. The vernacular fiction genre flourished in the 14th through 16th centuries of the Ming 明 dynasty, thanks to the expansion of commercial printing.
Unlike earlier ninth through 12th century classical literary tales written in the literary language about scholars, courtesans, semi-mythical characters, fox-spirits, and ghosts, the vernacular short story generally featured characters in an urban, middle-class setting. Money, marriage, social and business ethics, and the vagaries of fortune often constituted the principal plot concern. Of the four great works of extended fiction, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, and Journey to the West were all products of a long and gradual process of revision and embellishment by storytellers and editors over the centuries leading up to the Ming dynasty, so they can be considered collective national creations, even if their later Ming versions primarily reflect a single literary mind. This process of collective revision could even be said of Golden Lotus, which circulated in manuscript form among various Ming literati prior to appearing in several different editions. In their Ming manifestations, all four of these great works of extended fiction reflect a growing sense of literary irony in their retelling of the traditional story plot. This may have been an expression of growing literati dissatisfaction with the moral and political climate of the Ming court and society. The Ming also witnessed the flourishing of a new kind of literati music drama called chuan-chi 傳奇 (Grand Music Drama), the same Chinese name as the literary tales of the eighth century onward, but otherwise a completely separate literary genre. Unlike Yuan Music Drama, which continued to be written during the Ming, albeit in increasingly modified form, Grand Music Drama evolved from an early popular form of music drama in southern China known as nan-hsi 南戲 (Southern Music Drama) into a highly sophisticated theatrical genre that came to rival the prevailing Yuan Music Drama in literary quality. Grand Music Drama plots were more complex and expansive than the neat, highly structured Yuan Music Drama, which organized acts around suites of ditties in the same key or mode. Instead of being dominated by musical considerations, the structure of Grand Music Drama plots often became bipolar, with two major strands of plot development interwoven through the length of the play. The dominant plot strand was almost always a variation on the "Beauty-Scholar" theme so prevalent in both drama and fiction throughout the Ming. Various actors on the stage could also have singing roles at the same time, unlike the northern Yuan Music Drama, which restricted the singing role to a single star throughout the drama. The most influential early example of Grand Music Drama was The Lute 琵琶記 by Kao Ming 高明, which has even appeared in a highly modified version on the Broadway stage as The Lute Song. The 14th century Ming original used more extensive imagery and poetic diction than had ever been used before, setting a new standard for the Southern Music Drama tradition and lifting it beyond the ken of casual theater-goers. As a result, Grand Music Drama after The Lute gradually evolved into a new, highly complex musical tradition that took its name and some of its characteristics from the music of Kun-shan 崑山. Kun-chu 崑曲 (Kun Music Drama), as Grand Music Drama had then come to be called, reached its peak of popularity during the 16th century when Tang Hsien-tsu 湯顯祖 wrote his cycle of four dream plays, including The Peony Pavilion 牡丹亭. Although a famous scene from The Peony Pavilion is often performed today as one of the few remaining examples of Kun Music Drama, Tang Hsien-tzu was in fact less concerned for musical effect than for achieving highly theatrical effects through the lyrical intensity and figural density of his poetic imagery. The fall of the Ming dynasty and the ultimate consolidation of political power under the Manchus in the 17th century are reflected in the plot of the most famous 17th century Kun Music Drama, Peach Blossom Fan 桃花扇 by Kung Shang-jen 孔尚任. Peach Blossom Fan bore witness to the increasing distance between the musical and literary dimensions of Kun Music Drama, which culminated in the virtual demise of the form by the 18th century. However, a century earlier, the genre had reached the climax of its literary development in Hung Sheng's 洪昇 Palace of Eternal Sorrow 長生殿. Appropriately, it took as its plot a well-known narrative poem by the ninth century poet Pai Chu-i 白居易 titled "Song of Eternal Sorrow" 長恨歌, depicting the story of the eighth century Emperor Hsuan-tsung 唐玄宗 and the loss of his favorite imperial consort, Yang Kuei-fei 楊貴妃. Thus, 17th and 18th century Kun Music Drama achieved a literary richness beyond that of its predecessors, but in its greatest works, also conveyed a sense of despair and irrevocable loss indicative of the age. This same mixture of literary qualities can be found in increasing intensity among the majority of 17th through 19th century works of extended fiction, such as Wu Ching-tzu's 吳敬梓 The Scholars 儒林外史, Li Ju-chen's 李汝珍 Flowers in the Mirror 鏡花緣, and Tsao Hsueh-chin's 曹雪芹 Dream of the Red Chamber 紅樓夢, or as it is alternatively known, The Story of the Stone 石頭記. The extended fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries generally displayed a growing sense of despair at the moral lethargy of contemporary society. Among them were Wu Yen-jen's 吳趼人 Strange Events Witnessed in the Past Twenty Years 二十年目睹之怪現狀, Li Po-yuan's 李伯元 Bureaucracy Exposed 官場現形記, and Liu O's 劉鶚 The Travels of Lao Tsan 老殘遊記. Although fiction became increasingly popular from the 13th century onward, this was mainly as leisure reading among the literati and merchant class. After the Mongols were driven out in the 14th century and Han Chinese rule reestablished, efforts were made to return to the views and values of two earlier great periods of Han Chinese rule, the Han and Tang dynasties. The formalistic eight-legged essay 八股文 (so named because it was divided into eight parts) also got its start at this time. The eight-legged essay was the form adopted for the explication of the Confucian classics, which formed the basis for a reinstatement of the examination system. Thus, the eight-legged essay and imitations of the classical literary language of the earlier eras of Chinese cultural greatness became the major written genres of the time. There were no further breakthroughs in literary writing, except for a style of artistically heightened descriptions of everyday life experiences, called hsiao-pin 小品 ("little sketches"), which emerged in the 15th and 16th centuries. Fiction, in the form of jottings 筆記 that were written in the literary language, also regained popularity at this time. The most important collections in this genre were Pu Sung-ling's 蒲松齡 Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio 聊齋誌異 and Chi Hsiao-lan's 紀曉嵐 Jottings from the Thatched Hall of Close Observations 閱微草堂筆記. Although vernacular literature developed greatly during the 14th through 19th centuries, literature written in the classical literary language by scholars still constituted the cultural mainstream, given that literacy was still primarily their specialized province. This situation remained essentially unchanged up until the emergence of the New Literature movement.
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