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Pearl Buck – Nobel Lecture
Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1938
The Chinese Novel
When I came to consider what I should say
today it seemed that it would be wrong not to speak of China. And
this is none the less true because I am an American by birth and
by ancestry and though I live now in my own country and shall
live there, since there I belong. But it is the Chinese and not
the American novel which has shaped my own efforts in writing. My
earliest knowledge of story, of how to tell and write stories,
came to me in China. It would be ingratitude on my part not to
recognize this today. And yet it would be presumptuous to speak
before you on the subject of the Chinese novel for a reason
wholly personal. There is another reason why I feel that I may
properly do so. It is that I believe the Chinese novel has an
illumination for the Western novel and for the Western
novelist.
When I say Chinese novel, I mean the indigenous Chinese novel,
and not that hybrid product, the novels of modern Chinese writers
who have been too strongly under foreign influence while they
were yet ignorant of the riches of their own country.
The novel in China was never an art and was never so considered,
nor did any Chinese novelist think of himself as an artist. The
Chinese novel its history, its scope, its place in the life of
the people, so vital a place, must be viewed in the strong light
of this one fact. It is a fact no doubt strange to you, a company
of modern Western scholars who today so generously recognize the
novel.
But in China art and the novel have always been widely separated.
There, literature as an art was the exclusive property of the
scholars, an art they made and made for each other according to
their own rules, and they found no place in it for the novel. And
they held a powerful place, those Chinese scholars. Philosophy
and religion and letters and literature, by arbitrary classical
rules, they possessed them all, for they alone possessed the
means of learning, since they alone knew how to read and write.
They were powerful enough to be feared even by emperors, so that
emperors devised a way of keeping them enslaved by their own
learning, and made the official examinations the only means to
political advancement, those incredibly difficult examinations
which ate up a man's whole life and thought in preparing for
them, and kept him too busy with memorizing and copying the dead
and classical past to see the present and its wrongs. In that
past the scholars found their rules of art. But the novel was not
there, and they did not see it being created before their eyes,
for the people created the novel, and what living people were
doing did not interest those who thought of literature as an art.
If scholars ignored the people, however, the people, in turn,
laughed at the scholars. They made innumerable jokes about them,
of which this is a fair sample: One day a company of wild beasts
met on a hillside for a hunt. They bargained with each other to
go out and hunt all day and meet again at the end of the day to
share what they had killed. At the end of the day, only the tiger
returned with nothing. When he was asked how this happened he
replied very disconsolately, «At dawn I met a schoolboy, but
he was, I feared, too callow for your tastes. I met no more until
noon, when I found a priest. But I let him go, knowing him to be
full of nothing but wind. The day went on and I grew desperate,
for I passed no one. Then as dark came on I found a scholar. But
I knew there was no use in bringing him back since he would be so
dry and hard that he would break our teeth if we tried them on
him.»
The scholar as a class has long been a figure of fun for the
Chinese people. He is frequently to be found in their novels, and
always he is the same, as indeed he is in life, for a long study
of the same dead classics and their formal composition has really
made all Chinese scholars look alike, as well as think alike. We
have no class to parallel him in the West - individuals, perhaps,
only. But in China he was a class. Here he is, composite, as the
people see him: a small shrunken figure with a bulging forehead,
a pursed mouth, a nose at once snub and pointed, small
inconspicuous eyes behind spectacles, a high pedantic voice,
always announcing rules that do not matter to anyone but himself,
a boundless self-conceit, a complete scorn not only of the common
people but of all other scholars, a figure in long shabby robes,
moving with a swaying haughty walk, when he moved at all. He was
not to be seen except at literary gatherings, for most of the
time he spent reading dead literature and trying to write more
like it. He hated anything fresh or original, for he could not
catalogue it into any of the styles he knew. If he could not
catalogue it, he was sure it was not great, and he was confident
that only he was right. If he said, «Here is art», he
was convinced it was not to be found anywhere else, for what he
did not recognize did not exist. And as he could never catalogue
the novel into what he called literature, so for him it did not
exist as literature.
Yao Hai, one of the greatest of Chinese literary critics, in 1776
enumerated the kinds of writing which comprise the whole of
literature. They are essays, government commentaries,
biographies, epitaphs, epigrams, poetry, funeral eulogies, and
histories. No novels, you perceive, although by that date the
Chinese novel had already reached its glorious height, after
centuries of development among the common Chinese people. Nor
does that vast compilation of Chinese literature, Ssu Ku Chuen
Shu, made in 1772 by the order of the great Emperor Ch'ien
Lung, contain the novel in the encyclopedia of its literature
proper.
No, happily for the Chinese novel, it was not considered by the
scholars as literature. Happily, too, for the novelist! Man and
book, they were free from the criticisms of those scholars and
their requirements of art, their techniques of expression and
their talk of literary significances and all that discussion of
what is and is not art, as if art were an absolute and not the
changing thing it is, fluctuating even within decades! The
Chinese novel was free. It grew as it liked out of its own soil,
the common people, nurtured by that heartiest of sunshine,
popular approval, and untouched by the cold and frosty winds of
the scholar's art. Emily Dickinson, an American poet, once wrote,
«Nature is a haunted house, but art is a house that tries to
be haunted». «Nature», she said,
Is what we see,
Nature is what we know
But have no art to say -
So impatient our wisdom is,
To her simplicity.
No, if the Chinese scholars ever knew of
the growth of the novel, it was only to ignore it the more
ostentatiously. Sometimes, unfortunately, they found themselves
driven to take notice, because youthful emperors found novels
pleasant to read. Then these poor scholars were hard put to it.
But they discovered the phrase «social significance»,
and they wrote long literary treatises to prove that a novel was
not a novel but a document of social significance. Social
significance is a term recently discovered by the most modern of
literary young men and women in the United States, but the old
scholars of China knew it a thousand years ago, when they, too,
demanded that the novel should have social significance, if it
were to be recognized as an art.
But for the most part the old Chinese scholar reasoned thus about
the novel:
Literature is art.
All art has social significance.
This book has no social significance.
Therefore it is not literature.
And so the novel in China was not
literature.
In such a school was I trained. I grew up believing that the
novel has nothing to do with pure literature. So I was taught by
scholars. The art of literature, so I was taught, is something
devised by men of learning. Out of the brains of scholars came
rules to control the rush of genius, that wild fountain which has
its source in deepest life. Genius, great or less, is the spring,
and art is the sculptured shape, classical or modern, into which
the waters must be forced, if scholars and critics were to be
served. But the people of China did not so serve. The waters of
the genius of story gushed out as they would, however the natural
rocks allowed and the trees persuaded, and only common people
came and drank and found rest and pleasure.
For the novel in China was the peculiar product of the common
people. And it was solely their property. The very language of
the novel was their own language, and not the classical Wen-li,
which was the language of literature and the scholars. Wen-li
bore somewhat the same resemblance to the language of the people
as the ancient English of Chaucer does to the English of today,
although ironically enough, at one time Wen-li, too, was a
vernacular. But the scholars never kept pace with the living,
changing speech of the people. They clung to an old vernacular
until they had made it classic, while the running language of the
people went on and left them far behind. Chinese novels, then,
are in the «Pei Hua», or simple talk, of the people,
and this in itself was offensive to the old scholars because it
resulted in a style so full of easy flow and readability that it
had no technique of expression in it, the scholars said.
I should pause to make an exception of certain scholars who came
to China from India, bearing as their gift a new religion,
Buddhism. In the West, Puritanism was for a long time the enemy
of the novel. But in the Orient the Buddhists were wiser. When
they came into China, they found literature already remote from
the people and dying under the formalism of that period known in
history as the Six Dynasties. The professional men of literature
were even then absorbed not so much in what they had to say as in
pairing into couplets the characters of their essays and their
poems, and already they scorned all writing which did not conform
to their own rules. Into this confined literary atmosphere came
the Buddhist translators with their great treasures of the freed
spirit. Some of them were Indian, but some were Chinese. They
said frankly that their aim was not to conform to the ideas of
style of the literary men, but to make clear and simple to common
people what they had to teach. They put their religious teachings
into the common language, the language which the novel used, and
because the people loved story, they took story and made it a
means of teaching. The preface of Fah Shu Ching, one of the most
famous of Buddhist books, says, «When giving the words of
gods, these words should be given forth simply.» This might
be taken as the sole literary creed of the Chinese novelist, to
whom, indeed, gods were men and men were gods.
For the Chinese novel was written primarily to amuse the common
people. And when I say amuse I do not mean only to make them
laugh, though laughter is also one of the aims of the Chinese
novel. I mean amusement in the sense of absorbing and occupying
the whole attention of the mind. I mean enlightening that mind by
pictures of life and what that life means. I mean encouraging the
spirit not by rule-of-thumb talk about art, but by stories about
the people in every age, and thus presenting to people simply
themselves. Even the Buddhists who came to tell about gods found
that people understood gods better if they saw them working
through ordinary folk like themselves.
But the real reason why the Chinese novel was written in the
vernacular was because the common people could not read and write
and the novel had to be written so that when it was read aloud it
could be understood by persons who could communicate only through
spoken words. In a village of two hundred souls perhaps only one
man could read. And on holidays or in the evening when the work
was done he read aloud to the people from some story. The rise of
the Chinese novel began in just this simple fashion. After a
while people took up a collection of pennies in somebody's cap or
in a farm wife's bowl because the reader needed tea to wet his
throat, or perhaps to pay him for time he would otherwise have
spent at his silk loom or his rush weaving. If the collections
grew big enough he gave up some of his regular work and became a
professional storyteller. And the stories he read were the
beginnings of novels. There were not many such stories written
down, not nearly enough to last year in and year out for people
who had by nature, as the Chinese have, a strong love for
dramatic story. So the storyteller began to increase his stock.
He searched the dry annals of the history which the scholars had
written, and with his fertile imagination, enriched by long
acquaintance with common people, he clothed long-dead figures
with new flesh and made them live again; he found stories of
court life and intrigue and names of imperial favorites who had
brought dynasties to ruin; he found, as he traveled from village
to village, strange tales from his own times which he wrote down
when he heard them. People told him of experiences they had had
and he wrote these down, too, for other people. And he
embellished them, but not with literary turns and phrases, for
the people cared nothing for these. No, he kept his audiences
always in mind and he found that the style which they loved best
was one which flowed easily along, clearly and simply, in the
short words which they themselves used every day, with no other
technique than occasional bits of description, only enough to
give vividness to a place or a person, and never enough to delay
the story. Nothing must delay the story. Story was what they
wanted.
And when I say story, I do not mean mere pointless activity, not
crude action alone. The Chinese are too mature for that. They
have always demanded of their novel character above all else.
Shui Hu Chuan they have considered one of their three
greatest novels, not primarily because it is full of the flash
and fire of action, but because it portrays so distinctly one
hundred and eight characters that each is to be seen separate
from the others. Often I have heard it said of that novel in
tones of delight, «When anyone of the hundred and eight
begins to speak, we do not need to be told his name. By the way
the words come from his mouth we know who he is.» Vividness
of character portrayal, then, is the first quality which the
Chinese people have demanded of their novels, and after it, that
such portrayal shall be by the character's own action and words
rather than by the author's explanation.
Curiously enough, while the novel was beginning thus humbly in
teahouses, in villages and lowly city streets out of stories told
to the common people by a common and unlearned man among them, in
imperial palaces it was beginning, too, and in much the same
unlearned fashion. It was an old custom of emperors, particularly
if the dynasty were a foreign one, to employ persons called
«imperial ears», whose only duty was to come and go
among the people in the streets of cities and villages and to sit
among them in teahouses, disguised in common clothes and listen
to what was talked about there. The original purpose of this was,
of course, to hear of any discontent among the emperor's
subjects, and more especially to find out if discontents were
rising to the shape of those rebellions which preceded the fall
of every dynasty.
But emperors were very human and they were not often learned
scholars. More often, indeed, they were only spoiled and willful
men. The «imperial ears. had opportunity to hear all sorts
of strange and interesting stories, and they found that their
royal masters were more frequently interested in these stories
than they were in politics. So when they came back to make their
reports, they flattered the emperor and sought to gain favor by
telling him what he liked to hear, shut up as he was in the
Forbidden City, away from life. They told him the strange and
interesting things which common people did, who were free, and
after a while they took to writing down what they heard in order
to save memory. And I do not doubt that if messengers between the
emperor and the people carried stories in one direction, they
carried them in the other, too, and to the people they told
stories about the emperor and what he said and did, and how he
quarrelled with the empress who bore him no sons, and how she
intrigued with the chief eunuch to poison the favorite concubine,
all of which delighted the Chinese because it proved to them, the
most democratic of peoples, that their emperor was after all only
a common fellow like themselves and that he, too, had his
troubles, though he was the Son of Heaven. Thus there began
another important source for the novel that was to develop with
such form and force, though still always denied its right to
exist by the professional man of letters.
From such humble and scattered beginnings, then, came the Chinese
novel, written always in the vernacular, and dealing with all
which interested the people, with legend and with myth, with love
and intrigue, with brigands and wars, with everything, indeed,
which went to make up the life of the people, high and low.
Nor was the novel in China shaped, as it was in the West, by a
few great persons. In China the novel has always been more
important than the novelist. There has been no Chinese Defoe, no
Chinese Fielding or Smollett, no Austin or Brontë or Dickens
or Thackeray, or Meredith or Hardy, any more than Balzac or
Flaubert. But there were and are novels as great as the novels in
any other country in the world, as great as any could have
written, had he been born in China. Who then wrote these novels
of China?
That is what the modern literary men of China now, centuries too
late, are trying to discover. Within the last twenty-five years
literary critics, trained in the universities of the West, have
begun to discover their own neglected novels. But the novelists
who wrote them they cannot discover. Did one man write Shui Hu
Chuan, or did it grow to its present shape, added to,
rearranged, deepened and developed by many minds and many a hand,
in different centuries? Who can now tell? They are dead. They
lived in their day and wrote what in their day they saw and
heard, but of themselves they have told nothing. The author of
The Dream of the Red Chamber in a far later century says
in the preface to his book, «It is not necessary to know the
times of Han and T'ang - it is necessary to tell only of my own
times.»
They told of their own times and they lived in a blessed
obscurity. They read no reviews of their novels, no treatises as
to whether or not what they did was well done according to the
rules of scholarship. It did not occur to them that they must
reach the high thin air which scholars breathed nor - did they
consider the stuff of which greatness is made, according to the
scholars. They wrote as it pleased them to write and as they were
able. Sometimes they wrote unwittingly well and sometimes
unwittingly they wrote not so well. They died in the same happy
obscurity and now they are lost in it and not all the scholars of
China, gathered too late to do them honor, can raise them up
again. They are long past the possibility of literary
post-mortems. But what they did remains after them because it is
the common people of China who keep alive the great novels,
illiterate people who have passed the novel, not so often from
hand to hand as from mouth to mouth.
In the preface to one of the later editions of Shui Hu
Chuan, Shih Nai An, an author who had much to do with the
making of that novel, writes, «What I speak of I wish people
to understand easily. Whether the reader is good or evil, learned
or unlearned, anyone can read this book. Whether or not the book
is well done is not important enough to cause anyone to worry.
Alas, I am born to die. How can I know what those who come after
me who read my book will think of it? I cannot even know what I
myself, born into another incarnation, will think of it. I do not
know if I myself then can even read. Why therefore should I
care?»
Strangely enough, there were certain scholars who envied the
freedom of obscurity, and who, burdened with certain private
sorrows which they dared not tell anyone, or who perhaps wanting
only a holiday from the weariness of the sort of art they had
themselves created, wrote novels, too under assumed and humble
names. And when they did so they put aside pedantry and wrote as
simply and naturally as any common novelist.
For the novelist believed that he should not be conscious of
techniques. He should write as his material demanded. If a
novelist became known for a particular style or technique, to
that extent he ceased to be a good novelist and became a literary
technician.
A good novelist, or so I have been taught in China, should be
above all else tse ran, that is, natural, unaffected, and
so flexible and variable as to be wholly at the command of the
material that flows through him. His whole duty is only to sort
life as it flows through him, and in the vast fragmentariness of
time and space and event to discover essential and inherent order
and rhythm and shape. We should never be able, merely by reading
pages, to know who wrote them, for when the style of a novelist
becomes fixed, that style becomes his prison. The Chinese
novelists varied their writing to accompany like music their
chosen themes.
These Chinese novels are not perfect according to Western
standards. They are not always planned from beginning to end, nor
are they compact, any more than life is planned or compact. They
are often too long, too full of incident, too crowded with
character, a medley of fact and fiction as to material, and a
medley of romance and realism as to method, so that an impossible
event of magic or dream may be described with such exact
semblance of detail that one is compelled to belief against all
reason. The earliest novels are full of folklore, for the people
of those times thought and dreamed in the ways of folklore. But
no one can understand the mind of China today who has not read
these novels, for the novels have shaped the present mind, too,
and the folklore persists in spite of all that Chinese diplomats
and Western-trained scholars would have us believe to the
contrary. The essential mind of China is still that mind of which
George Russell wrote when he said of the Irish mind, so strangely
akin to the Chinese,« that mind which in its folk
imagination believes anything. It creates ships of gold with
masts of silver and white cities by the sea and rewards and
faeries, and when that vast folk mind turns to politics it is
ready to believe anything.»
Out of this folk mind, turned into stories and crowded with
thousands of years of life, grew, literally, the Chinese novel.
For these novels changed as they grew. If, as I have said, there
are no single names attached beyond question to the great novels
of China, it is because no one hand wrote them. From beginning as
a mere tale, a story grew through succeeding versions, into a
structure built by many hands. I might mention as an example the
well-known story, The White Snake, or Pei She
Chuan, first written in the T'ang dynasty by an unknown
author. It was then a tale of the simple supernatural whose hero
was a great white snake. In the next version in the following
century, the snake has become a vampire woman who is an evil
force. But the third version contains a more gentle and human
touch. The vampire becomes a faithful wife who aids her husband
and gives him a son. The story thus adds not only new character
but new quality, and ends not as the supernatural tale it began
but as a novel of human beings.
So in early periods of Chinese history, many books must be called
not so much novels as source books for novels, the sort of books
into which Shakespeare, had they been open to him, might have
dipped with both hands to bring up pebbles to make into jewels.
Many of these books have been lost, since they were not
considered valuable. But not all - early stories of Han, written
so vigorously that to this day it is said they run like galloping
horses, and tales of the troubled dynasties following - not all
were lost. Some have persisted. In the Ming dynasty, in one way
or another, many of them were represented in the great collection
known as T'ai P'ing Kuan Shi, wherein are tales of
superstition and religion, of mercy and goodness and reward for
evil and well doing, tales of dreams and miracles, of dragons and
gods and goddesses and priests, of tigers and foxes and
transmigration and resurrection from the dead. Most of these
early stories had to do with supernatural events, of gods born of
virgins, of men walking as gods, as the Buddhist influence grew
strong. There are miracles and allegories, such as the pens of
poor scholars bursting into flower, dreams leading men and women
into strange and fantastic lands of Gulliver, or the magic wand
that floated an altar made of iron. But stories mirrored each
age. The stories of Han were vigorous and dealt often with the
affairs of the nation, and centered on some great man or hero.
Humor was strong in this golden age, a racy, earthy, lusty humor,
such as was to be found, for instance, in a book of tales
entitled Siao Ling, presumed to have been collected, if
not partly written, by Han Tang Suan. And then the scenes
changed, as that golden age faded, though it was never to be
forgotten, so that to this day the Chinese like to call
themselves sons of Han. With the succeeding weak and corrupt
centuries, the very way the stories were written became honeyed
and weak, and their subjects slight, or as the Chinese say,
«In the days of the Six Dynasties, they wrote of small
things, of a woman, a waterfall, or a bird.»
If the Han dynasty was golden, then the T'ang dynasty was silver,
and silver were the love stories for which it was famous. It was
an age of love, when a thousand stories clustered about the
beautiful Yang Kuei Fei and her scarcely less beautiful
predecessor in the emperor's favor, Mei Fei. These love stories
of T'ang come very near sometimes to fulfilling in their unity
and complexity the standards of the Western novel. There are
rising action and crisis and dénouement, implicit if not
expressed. The Chinese say, «We must read the stories of
T'ang, because though they deal with small matters, yet they are
written in so moving a manner that the tears come.
It is not surprising that most of these love stories deal not
with love that ends in marriage or is contained in marriage, but
with love outside the marriage relationship. Indeed, it is
significant that when marriage is the theme the story nearly
always ends in tragedy. Two famous stories, Pei Li Shi and
Chiao Fang Chi, deal entirely with extramarital love, and
are written apparently to show the superiority of the courtesans,
who could read and write and sing and were clever and beautiful
besides, beyond the ordinary wife who was, as the Chinese say
even today, «a yellow-faced woman », and usually
illiterate.
So strong did this tendency become that officialdom grew alarmed
at the popularity of such stories among the common people, and
they were denounced as revolutionary and dangerous because it was
thought they attacked that foundation of Chinese civilization,
the family system. A reactionary tendency was not lacking, such
as is to be seen in Hui Chen Chi, one of the earlier forms
of a famous later work, the story of the young scholar who loved
the beautiful Ying Ying and who renounced her, saying prudently
as he went away, «All extraordinary women are dangerous.
They destroy themselves and others. They have ruined even
emperors. I am not an emperor and I had better give her up »
- which he did, to the admiration of all wise men. And to him the
modest Ying Ying replied, «If you possess me and leave me,
it is your right. I do not reproach you.» But five hundred
years later the sentimentality of the Chinese popular heart comes
forth and sets the thwarted romance right again. In this last
version of the story the author makes Chang and Ying Ying husband
and wife and says in closing, «This is in the hope that all
the lovers of the world may be united in happy marriage.»
And as time goes in China, five hundred years is not long to wait
for a happy ending.
This story, by the way, is one of China's most famous. It was
repeated in the Sung dynasty in a poetic form by Chao Teh Liang,
under the title The Reluctant Butterfly, and again in the
Yuan dynasty by Tung Chai-yuen as a drama to be sung, entitled
Suh Hsi Hsiang. In the Ming dynasty, with two versions
intervening, it appears as Li Reh Hua's Nan Hsi Hsiang
Chi, written in the southern metrical form called
«ts'e», and so to the last and most famous Hsi
Hsiang Chi. Even children in China know the name of Chang
Sen.
If I seem to emphasize the romances of the T'ang period, it is
because romance between man and woman is the chief gift of T'ang
to the novel, and not because there were no other stories. There
were many novels of a humorous and satirical nature and one
curious type of story which concerned itself with cockfighting,
an important pastime of that age and particularly in favor at
court. One of the best of these tales is Tung Chen Lao Fu
Chuan, by Ch'en Hung, which tells how Chia Chang, a famous
cockfighter, became so famous that he was loved by emperor and
people alike.
But time and the stream pass on. The novel form really begins to
be clear in the Sung dynasty, and in the Yuan dynasty it flowers
into that height which was never again surpassed and only
equalled, indeed, by the single novel Hung Lou Meng, or
The Dream of the Red Chamber, in the Ts'ing dynasty. It is
as though for centuries the novel had been developing unnoticed
and from deep roots among the people, spreading into trunk and
branch and twig and leaf to burst into this flowering in the Yuan
dynasty, when the young Mongols brought into the old country they
had conquered their vigorous, hungry, untutored minds and
demanded to be fed. Such minds could not be fed with the husks of
the old classical literature, and they turned therefore the more
eagerly to the drama and the novel, and in this new life, in the
sunshine of imperial favor, though still not with literary favor,
there came two of China's three great novels, Shui Hu
Chuan and San Kuo-Hung Lou Meng being the third.
I wish I could convey to you what these three novels mean and
have meant to the Chinese people. But I can think of nothing
comparable to them in Western literature. We have not in the
history of our novel so clear a moment to which we can point and
say, «There the novel is at its height.» These three
are the vindication of that literature of the common people, the
Chinese novel. They stand as completed monuments of that popular
literature, if not of letters. They, too, were ignored by men of
letters and banned by censors and damned in succeeding dynasties
as dangerous, revolutionary, decadent. But they lived on, because
people read them and told them as stories and sang them as songs
and ballads and acted them as dramas, until at last grudgingly
even the scholars were compelled to notice them and to begin to
say they were not novels at all but allegories, and if they were
allegories perhaps then they could be looked upon as literature
after all, though the people paid no heed to such theories and
never read the long treatises which scholars wrote to prove them.
They rejoiced in the novels they had made as novels and for no
purpose except for joy in story and in story through which they
could express themselves.
And indeed the people had made them. Shui Hu Chuan, though
the modern versions carry the name of Shi Nai An as author, was
written by no one man. Out of a handful of tales centering in the
Sung dynasty about a band of robbers there grew this great,
structured novel. Its beginnings were in history. The original
lair which the robbers held still exists in Shantung, or did
until very recent times. Those times of the thirteenth century of
our Western era were, in China, sadly distorted. The dynasty
under the emperor Huei Chung was falling into decadence and
disorder. The rich grew richer and the poor poorer and when none
other came forth to set this right, these righteous robbers came
forth.
I cannot here tell you fully of the long growth of this novel,
nor of its changes at many hands. Shih Nai An, it is said, found
it in rude form in an old book shop and took it home and rewrote
it. After him the story was still told and re-told. Five or six
versions of it today have importance, one with a hundred chapters
entitled Chung I Shui Hu, one of a hundred and
twenty-seven chapters, and one of a hundred chapters. The
original version attributed to Shih Nai An, had a hundred and
twenty chapters, but the one most used today has only seventy.
This is the version arranged in the Ming dynasty by the famous
Ching Shen T'an, who said that it was idle to forbid his son to
read the book and therefore presented the lad with a copy revised
by himself, knowing that no boy could ever refrain from reading
it. There is also a version written under official command, when
officials found that nothing could keep the people from reading
Shui Hu. This official version is entitled Tung K'ou
Chi, or, Laying Waste the Robbers, and it tells of the
final defeat of the robbers by the state army and their
destruction. But the common people of China are nothing if not
independent. They have never adopted the official version, and
their own form of the novel still stands. It is a struggle they
know all too well, the struggle of everyday people against a
corrupt officialdom.
I might add that Shui Hu Chuan is in partial translation
in French under the title Les Chevaliers Chinois, and the
seventy-chapter version is in complete English translation by
myself under the title All Men Are Brothers. The original
title, Shui Hu Chuan, in English is meaningless, denoting
merely the watery margins of the famous marshy lake which was the
robbers' lair. To Chinese the words invoke instant century-old
memory, but not to us.
This novel has survived everything and in this new day in China
has taken on an added significance. The Chinese Communists have
printed their own edition of it with a preface by a famous
Communist and have issued it anew as the first Communist
literature of China. The proof of the novel's greatness is in
this timelessness. It is as true today as it was dynasties ago.
The people of China still march across its pages, priests and
courtesans, merchants and scholars, women good and bad, old and
young, and even naughty little boys. The only figure lacking is
that of the modern scholar trained in the West, holding his Ph.D.
diploma in his hand. But be sure that if he had been alive in
China when the final hand laid down the brush upon the pages of
that book, he, too, would have been there in all the pathos and
humor of his new learning, so often useless and inadequate and
laid like a patch too small upon an old robe.
The Chinese say «The young should not read Shui Hu
and the old should not read San Kuo.» This is because
the young might be charmed into being robbers and the old might
be led into deeds too vigorous for their years. For if Shui Hu
Chuan is the great social document of Chinese life, Sa
Kuo is the document of wars and statesmanship, and in its
turn Hung Lou Meng is the document of family life and
human love.
The history of the San Kuo or Three Kingdoms shows
the same architectural structure and the same doubtful authorship
as Shui Hu. The story begins with three friends swearing
eternal brotherhood in the Han dynasty and ends ninety-seven
years later in the succeeding period of the Six Dynasties. It is
a novel rewritten in its final form by a man named Lo Kuan Chung,
thought to be a pupil of Shih Nai An, and one who perhaps even
shared with Shih Nai An in the writing, too, of Shui Hu
Chuan. But this is a Chinese Baconand-Shakespeare controversy
which has no end.
Lo Kuan Chung was born in the late Yuan dynasty and lived on into
the Ming. He wrote many dramas, but he is more famous for his
novels, of which San Kuo is easily the best. The version
of this novel now most commonly used in China is the one revised
in the time of K'ang Hsi by Mao Chen Kan, who revised as well as
criticised the book. He changed, added and omitted material, as
for example when he added the story of Suan Fu Ren, the wife of
one of the chief characters. He altered even the style. If
Shui Hu Chuan has importance today as a novel of the
people in their struggle for liberty, San Kuo has
importance because it gives in such detail the science and art of
war as the Chinese conceive it, so differently, too, from our
own. The guerillas, who are today China's most effective fighting
units against Japan, are peasants who know San Kuo by heart, if
not from their own reading, at least from hours spent in the
idleness of winter days or long summer evenings when they sat
listening to the storytellers describe how the warriors of the
Three Kingdoms fought their battles. It is these ancient tactics
of war which the guerillas trust today. What a warrior must be
and how he must attack and retreat, how retreat when the enemy
advances, how advance when the enemy retreats - all this had its
source in this novel, so well known to every common man and boy
of China.
Hung Lou Meng, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, the
latest and most modern of these three greatest of Chinese novels,
was written originally as an autobiographical novel by Ts'ao
Hsüeh Ching, an official highly in favor during the Manchu
regime and indeed considered by the Manchus as one of themselves.
There were then eight military groups among the Manchus, and
Tstao Hsüeh Ching belonged to them all. He never finished
his novel, and the last forty chapters were added by another man,
probably named Kao O. The thesis that Ts'ao Hsüeh Ching was
telling the story of his own life has been in modern times
elaborated by Hu Shih, and in earlier times by Yuan Mei. Be this
as it may, the original title of the book was Shih T'ou
Chi, and it came out of Peking about 1765 of the Western era,
and in five or six years, an incredibly short time in China, it
was famous everywhere. Printing was still expensive when it
appeared, and the book became known by the method that is called
in China,
«You-lend-me-a-book-and-I-lend-you-a-book».
The story is simple in its theme but complex in implication, in
character study and in its portrayal of human emotions. It is
almost a pathological study, this story of a great house, once
wealthy and high in imperial favor, so that indeed one of its
members was an imperial concubine. But the great days are over
when the book begins. The family is already declining. Its wealth
is being dissipated and the last and only son, Chia Pao Yü,
is being corrupted by the decadent influences within his own
home, although the fact that he was a youth of exceptional
quality at birth is established by the symbolism of a piece of
jade found in his mouth. The preface begins, «Heaven was
once broken and when it was mended, a bit was left unused, and
this became the famous jade of Chia Pao Yü.» Thus does
the interest in the supernatural persist in the Chinese people;
it persists even today as a part of Chinese life.
This novel seized hold of the people primarily because it
portrayed the problems of their own family system, the absolute
power of women in the home, the too great power of the
matriarchy, the grandmother, the mother, and even the bondmaids,
so often young and beautiful and fatally dependent, who became
too frequently the playthings of the sons of the house and ruined
them and were ruined by them. Women reigned supreme in the
Chinese house, and because they were wholly confined in its walls
and often illiterate, they ruled to the hurt of all. They kept
men children, and protected them from hardship and effort when
they should not have been so protected. Such a one was Chia Pao
Yü, and we follow him to his tragic end in Hung Lou
Meng.
I cannot tell you to what lengths of allegory scholars went to
explain away this novel when they found that again even the
emperor was reading it and that its influence was so great
everywhere among the people. I do not doubt that they were
probably reading it themselves in secret. A great many popular
jokes in China have to do with scholars reading novels privately
and publicly pretending never to have heard of them. At any rate,
scholars wrote treatises to prove that Hung Lou Meng was
not a novel but a political allegory depicting the decline of
China under the foreign rule of the Manchus, the word Red in the
title signifying Manchu, and Ling Tai Yü, the young girl who
dies, although she was the one destined to marry Pao Yü,
signifying China, and Pao Ts'ai, her successful rival, who
secures the jade in her place, standing for the foreigner, and so
forth. The very name Chia signified, they said, falseness. But
this was a farfetched explanation of what was written as a novel
and stands as a novel and as such a powerful delineation, in the
characteristic Chinese mixture of realism and romance, of a proud
and powerful family in decline. Crowded with men and women of the
several generations accustomed to living under one roof in China,
it stands alone as an intimate description of that life.
In so emphasizing these three novels, I have merely done what the
Chinese themselves do. When you say «novel», the
average Chinese replies, « Shui Hu, San Kuo, Hung Lou
Meng.» Yet this is not to say that there are not hundreds of
other novels, for there are. I must mention Hsi Yü
Chi, or Record of Travels in the West, almost as
popular as these three. I might mention Feng Shen Chuan,
the story of a deified warrior, the author unknown but said to be
a writer in the time of Ming. I must mention Ru Ling Wai
Shi, a satire upon the evils of the Tsing dynasty,
particularly of the scholars, full of a double-edged though not
malicious dialogue, rich with incident, pathetic and humorous.
The fun here is made of the scholars who can do nothing
practical, who are lost in the world of useful everyday things,
who are so bound by convention that nothing original can come
from them. The book, though long, has no central character. Each
figure is linked to the next by the thread of incident, person
and incident passing on together until, as Lu Hsün, the
famous modern Chinese writer, has said, «they are like
scraps of brilliant silk and satin sewed together.»
And there is Yea Shou Pei Yin, or An Old Hermit Talks
in the Sun, written by a famous man disappointed in official
preferment, Shia of Kiang-yin, and there is that strangest of
books, Ching Hua Yuen, a fantasy of women, whose ruler was
an empress, whose scholars were all women. It is designed to show
that the wisdom of women is equal to that of men, although I must
acknowledge that the book ends with a war between men and women
in which the men are triumphant and the empress is supplanted by
an emperor.
But I can mention only a small fraction of the hundreds of novels
which delight the common people of China. And if those people
knew of what I was speaking to you today, they would after all
say «tell of the great three, and let us stand or fall by
Shui Hu Chuan and San Kuo and Hung Lou
Meng.» In these three novels are the lives which the
Chinese people lead and have long led, here are the songs they
sing and the things at which they laugh and the things which they
love to do. Into these novels they have put the generations of
their being and to refresh that being they return to these novels
again and again, and out of them they have made new songs and
plays and other novels. Some of them have come to be almost as
famous as the great originals, as for example Ching P'ing
Mei, that classic of romantic physical love, taken from a
single incident in Shui Hu Chuan.
But the important thing for me today is not the listing of
novels. The aspect which I wish to stress is that all this
profound and indeed sublime development of the imagination of a
great democratic people was never in its own time and country
called literature. The very name for story was «hsiao shuo
», denoting something slight and valueless, and even a novel
was only a «ts'ang p'ien hsiao shuo », or a longer
something which was still slight and useless. No, the people of
China forged their own literature apart from letters. And today
this is what lives, to be part of what is to come, and all the
formal literature, which was called art, is dead. The plots of
these novels are often incomplete, the love interest is often not
brought to solution, heroines are often not beautiful and heroes
often are not brave. Nor has the story always an end; sometimes
it merely stops, in the way life does, in the middle of it when
death is not expected.
In this tradition of the novel have I been born and reared as a
writer. My ambition, therefore, has not been trained toward the
beauty of letters or the grace of art. It is, I believe, a sound
teaching and, as I have said, illuminating for the novels of the
West.
For here is the essence of the attitude of Chinese novelists -
perhaps the result of the contempt in which they were held by
those who considered themselves the priests of art. I put it thus
in my own words, for none of them has done so.
The instinct which creates the arts is not the same as
that which produces art. The creative instinct is, in its final
analysis and in its simplest terms, an enormous extra vitality, a
super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual, a vitality
great beyond all the needs of his own living - an energy which no
single life can consume. This energy consumes itself then in
creating more life, in the form of music, painting, writing, or
whatever is its most natural medium of expression. Nor can the
individual keep himself from this process, because only by its
full function is he relieved of the burden of this extra and
peculiar energy - an energy at once physical and mental, so that
all his senses are more alert and more profound than another
man's, and all his brain more sensitive and quickened to that
which his senses reveal to him in such abundance that actuality
overflows into imagination. It is a process proceeding from
within. It is the heightened activity of every cell of his being,
which sweeps not only himself, but all human life about him, or
in him, in his dreams, into the circle of its activity.
From the product of this activity, art is deducted - but not by
him. The process which creates is not the process which deduces
the shapes of art. The defining of art, therefore, is a secondary
and not a primary process. And when one born for the primary
process of creation, as the novelist is, concerns himself with
the secondary process, his activity becomes meaningless. When he
begins to make shapes and styles and techniques and new schools,
then he is like a ship stranded upon a reef whose propeller,
whirl wildly as it will, cannot drive the ship onward. Not until
the ship is in its element again can it regain its course.
And for the novelist the only element is human life as he finds
it in himself or outside himself. The sole test of his work is
whether or not his energy is producing more of that life. Are his
creatures alive? That is the only question. And who can tell him?
Who but those living human beings, the people? Those people are
not absorbed in what art is or how it is made-are not, indeed,
absorbed in anything very lofty, however good it is. No, they are
absorbed only in themselves, in their own hungers and despairs
and joys and above all, perhaps, in their own dreams. These are
the ones who can really judge the work of the novelist, for they
judge by that single test of reality. And the standard of the
test is not to be made by the device of art, but by the simple
comparison of the reality of what they read, to their own
reality.
I have been taught, therefore, that though the novelist may see
art as cool and perfect shapes, he may only admire them as he
admires marble statues standing aloof in a quiet and remote
gallery; for his place is not with them. His place is in the
street. He is happiest there. The street is noisy and the men and
women are not perfect in the technique of their expression as the
statues are. They are ugly and imperfect, incomplete even as
human beings, and where they come from and where they go cannot
be known. But they are people and therefore infinitely to be
preferred to those who stand upon the pedestals of art.
And like the Chinese novelist, I have been taught to want to
write for these people. If they are reading their magazines by
the million, then I want my stories there rather than in
magazines read only by a few. For story belongs to the people.
They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses
are unspoiled and their emotions are free. No, a novelist must
not think of pure literature as his goal. He must not even know
this field too well, because people, who are his material, are
not there. He is a storyteller in a village tent, and by his
stories he entices people into his tent. He need not raise his
voice when a scholar passes. But he must beat all his drums when
a band of poor pilgrims pass on their way up the mountain in
search of gods. To them he must cry, «I, too, tell of
gods!» And to farmers he must talk of their land, and to old
men he must speak of peace, and to old women he must tell of
their children, and to young men and women he must speak of each
other. He must be satisfied if the common people hear him gladly.
At least, so I have been taught in China.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
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