Chinese Storytelling
The interplay of traditions
A Thousand Years of Chinese Storytelling: Storytelling as a professional genre of oral entertainment goes back more than a thousand years in Chinese society. In spite of the low social esteem in which the storytellers are held, their art always had a heavy impact on the daily life of the Chinese townspeople, serving as the 'university' of ordinary people, the place where culture and knowledge was communicated in an entertaining and simple way.
* By VIBEKE BØRDAHL
'Whenever the children of the lanes and streets are naughty and their parents get annoyed they hastily give them some coins and tell them to go and sit down to listen to stories about old times. When the tale of The Three Kingdoms is told, and they hear about the defeat of Liu Bei, they fret and some even shed tears. When they hear of Cao Cao's defeat, they become happy and applaud. This shows that the worthy man and the mean will both leave their mark, not to be erased in a hundred generations.'
Su Dongpo (1036-1101)
Thus, in the storytellers' house of Yangzhou, one of the traditional strongholds of Chinese storytelling, we find the following words enscribed on the wooden boards hanging on each side of the stage: 'Past and present are related, advice is passed along / Good words to enlighten the world, instruction infused in amusement!'
The oral genre of storytelling played a significant role in the formation of the written genres of the novel and short story. Conversely, the historical and fictional genres that were transmitted in written form, deeply influenced the oral genres. The orality/literacy dichotomy, treated in its culture-specific context, seems to be of major importance when seeking an understanding of the structural specifics and conditions of existence of the oral arts.
The storytelling genres have survived as orally transmitted traditions up to our present time and, as such, they offer a unique territory for research into oral tradition. The transformation of Chinese society at the end of the twentieth century is reflected in fundamental changes in the areas of human communication and performance. It remains to be seen if the modern lifestyle and new information technology will speed up further the demise of the age-old genres of oral entertainment in China, or whether the new conditions may bring about a renaissance. A thousand years ago there was the following saying in China: 'The storyteller only relies on his three inch-long tongue, and yet he is able to show us what is superficial in this world and where we find the deep ground.'
In my research, I aim to study the development and mutual influence between the oral arts in China with special attention to the interface between the written literature and the oral traditions of storytelling. The research is based on my fieldwork on oral storytelling of the 'Water Margin' (Shuihu) cycle in the Lower Yangzi area, with a focus on Yangzhou storytelling (Yangzhou pinghua). The performances of the Yangzhou storytellers are compared to other oral, oral-related, and literary texts related to the 'Water Margin' theme, with emphasis on the Wu Song saga: Oral performances (audio- and videotaped) of stories about Wu Song as found in a spectrum of performed genres (quyi) from other parts of China. Oral-related texts, such as scripts for a number of performed genres (shuochang wenxue), editions, old and new, refined and popular, of the novel Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan).
The analysis includes the following topics:
1. 'The Written Legacy of Storytelling': Early Chinese storytelling on the 'Water Margin' theme; drama, novel, and contemporary storytelling; the 'storyteller's manner' in the novel and in the storytelling genres of pre-modern and modern times; modern storyteller books.
2. 'The Oral Testimony of Storytelling': Contemporary oral genres of Chinese storytelling on the 'Water Margin'; features of orality; features of literacy; memorization and improvisation.
Aims and methods
In the West, the 'Homeric question' incited an avalanche of studies of what 'orality' and 'literacy' meant for ancient Greece (and for the Yugoslav poets of the Parry-Lord collections). These studies are also important for our understanding of Chinese literature, especially when we want to explore the oral traditions. However, in the professional traditions of Chinese storytelling and other oral arts that have survived to the present, we find similarities, but also obvious differences from ancient Greek oral tradition, as well as from the Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic oral traditions of the medieval period:
In China, a plethora of these traditions are still living. We have the possibility to know or inquire about many things that one can only guess or theorize about in the ancient Greek and medieval European traditions.
Concrete historical sources on most of the individual oral traditions in China of today go back only three to four hundred years. They belong, however, to a very much older culture of rich literary as well as oral traditions. There has been a constant diffusion (both ways) of ideas, styles and formulas between the written and oral genres (in contrast to the Homeric tradition which existed in a largely pre-literate society with little use of writing).
Many of the oral traditions of China, particularly the storytelling traditions, are in prose, not bound by metre and rhyme. Therefore the improvisational aspects are much more pronounced than in the great epic poetry of the West. The professional oral traditions in China have, as long as we know, been practised in a society deeply imbued with writing and literature. The interplay of oral and literary components forms a basic pattern in Chinese storytelling. This has important implications for our understanding of the social and literary functions of the oral arts. At the same time as these arts were welcome among the illiterate and the poor, who had little chance of a literary education, they were also in many cases well-esteemed entertainment for the learned connoisseurs.
The themes of the long-continued tales, as well as the rules for learning and performing the art, have survived through the centuries, going back ultimately to the popular amusement districts of the Song Dynasty (907-1279). There are still old storytellers, educated on the basis of oral transmission and performing according to traditional rules.
The repertoires in which storytellers of different schools excel are of enormous dimensions. What were the principles of education practised in the time-honoured tradition of 'transmitting by mouth and teaching from the heart' (kou chuan xin shou)? What part of the repertoire was supposed to be learned by heart? To what degree are the spoken texts formulaic and in what sense? Is there a largely individual historical background to each of the items of the repertoire or can we establish some general characteristics for the formation of the repertoires?
The 'orality' and the improvisational aspect of the Chinese professional oral arts has been questioned. It has long been debated whether the storyteller's art was 'genuinely oral' or only 'pseudo-oral', i.e. a kind of artistic performance of written texts learned by heart. I think that we have to acknowledge the specific conditions of every 'oral' tradition: the categories of methodology must fit the object, and be so fine-meshed that we catch the essential characteristics of the tradition. While Western theories and discussions are valuable as background and methodological tools, it is no less important to look into the way Chinese scholars treat their own heritage, and it seems particularly fruitful to inquire into the storytellers' and other oral artists' own understanding of their art, their professional terminology.
For more than ten years I have been performing intensive fieldwork on oral storytelling in China, mainly in the Lower Yangzi area, Yangzhou and Suzhou, but also recently in North China, Tianjin and Beijing. My research involves small-scale teamwork with Chinese storytellers and co-operation with the photographer Jette Ross, Photo Atelier, Copenhagen. A monograph is being prepared for publication entitled, Wu Song Fights the Tiger The Interplay of Oral and Written Tradition in Chinese Storytelling. A book for general readership, illustrated with photos by Jette Ross, Chinese Storytellers The Life and Art of Yangzhou Storytellers, will be ready for publication this year. *
Dr Vibeke Børdahl is an senior researcher at the Danish Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities (DIASH) and an affiliated researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen, Denmark. She visited the IIAS in Leiden, the Netherlands, between 21 August and 1 September 2000 as a NIAS exchange fellow.
E-mail: vbordahl@online.no