Scholar: Patrick Hanan's "Language and Narrative Model" (1/3)

Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story (Harvard, 1981)

Chapter 1: Language and Narrative Model
Section 1/3 : Classical and Vernacular ; Language and Style

Hanan's first chapter compares literary and vernacular languages in the complex case of Chinese to outline the history of a vernacular literary public from its earliest inception in the Tang, through major shifts and additions during the Mongol Yuan dynasty, and rise to a prominence we see through the life of the great vernacular writer Feng Menglong in the Ming dynasty.

Behind Hanan's intimidating tour through centuries of stories, one senses the wonder of publics, groups of people with shared language and practice. Throughout Chinese history, all those who could write revered the Chinese tradition, and this reverence is expressed not only in the deep conservatism of the literary language, but in the incessant humming activity of it, which for Hanan makes classical Chinese very different from the medieval Latin to which it is too often compared. Buddhism, with its brand new communities of believers centered on masters from a new tradition, is one major force driving the new vernacular publics of the Tang dynasty. And the tremendous popularity of the drama was what drove the gradual standardization of Northern dialects into a vernacular for composition -- stories were probably a huge part of this drive, too, but more examples of the drama survive and hold influence today, making Yuan drama a vivid demonstration of "the normative power of the genre concept." (9)

The vernacular established by the known publics for drama must have corresponded with a reading public for vernacular fiction -- but how many people read fiction, and who were they? The question is more difficult to answer in the Chinese case than in European cases because very little attention was paid to fiction. Drama was a minor genre, necessarily in vernacular to represent speech, and all other legitimate literary genres were in classical Chinese. Vernacular Chinese was used for teaching students to read, and we know that women learned to read in the vernacular, but in most times and places of pre-modern China, fiction held a position subordinate even to drama.

Writers of fiction could be "amateurs" such as Li Yu, the great Qing playwright who also wrote fiction; his fiction is collected in his complete works only because of his accomplishments in drama and classical Chinese writing. The could also be "anonymous professionals" like the authors of the many chapter novels of the late Ming and Qing. Perhaps they worked as clerks or editors in publishing houses. They did not associate their names with their work. In many cases (as in Jin ping mei), their manuscripts were not even published in their lifetime. In this period, there was simply no way to live the life of the professional fiction writer that we take for granted today.

The use of vernacular to learn Chinese, even classical Chinese, hints at the complexity of the relationship between classical and vernacular. In fact, they are linked by a common grammar (Hanan is vague here, but says it is based on word order, 13-4). This linkage by grammar made it entirely possible for a writer to employ a mixture of classical and vernacular language. In fact, vernacular fiction is a diverse proliferation of mixing, which can be done with specific styles in mind. Using classical adds refinement, as we see in the poems and aphorisms; using vernacular makes the scene more evocative -- it's much better for dialogue and action sequences.

Reading list derived from pp. 1-16:

• Xu Nanci's 1907 impressions of readers in the shops (11-2, translation candidate)
• Aina, Idle Talk under the Bean Arbor (Doupeng xianhua) (13)
• 1494 preface to Sanguo (15)
• try comparing fight scenes from Sanguo and Shuihu

A few quotes:

The general characteristics of literary languages have been summarized as selectivity, homogeneity, and conservatism. (3)

The vernacular is first used in place of the literary language when it is important to record the actual words spoken or when rendering oral literature in written form or when composing a piece to be performed orally. (5)