Historiography and Fiction in Chinese Culture
Any act of signification has to be executed through a certain medium. However, medium (in our case, the Chinese vernacular language) is neither neutral nor passive. It moulds the formal features of the message into a culturally acknowledged pattern habitu
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Historiography and Fiction in Chinese Culture
I Any act of signification has to be executed through a certain medium. However, medium (in our case, the Chinese vernacular language) is neither neutral nor passive. It moulds the formal features of the message into a culturally acknowledged pattern habitually called genre. Genre facilitates the interpretation, but, on the other hand, restricts the scope of signification. For literature, this restriction is not always desirable. Often we find in any type of discourse an inclination to break away from the boundary of its own communicative pattern in an effort to achieve the effects of other genres. This extra-generic emulation may take place at an early stage of new genres. Early photography emulated painting, and early film emulated theatrical performance. One of the main reasons for this emulation of other discursive genres, apart from technical reasons, is that the “lower” genres have to prove that they can function in a similar fashion to more prestigious genres. They grow out of this premature extra-generic emulation when their own cultural position is established and culturally recognized. In a pyramidic culture like that of China, however, extra-generic emulation can become a constant aspiration for the culturally lower genres, as they do not hope to enjoy a cultural mobility to move out of the lower strata. Chinese vernacular fiction, for centuries situated so low in the cultural discursive hierarchy, had to continue to emulate certain prestigious genres in order to justify itself. In this way, the extrageneric emulation finally turned into the cultural paradigm of the genre,1 to be its basic principle of signification. Historiography used to be the supreme narrative model in China, and, in the light of the long-standing proposition that all the Six Scriptures mentioned by Confucius (li, ritual; yue, musical; shu, documental; shi, poetical; yi, divinatory; and chunqiu, chronological) are de facto histories (liujing jieshi), historiography is indeed regarded 1 Paradigm
is a pattern that recurs in a certain type of discourse, and helps formulate its meaning. According to Kuhn (1970: 113), a paradigm has little to do with the subject-matter, but much to do with the groups of participants.
© Foreign Language Teaching and Research Publishing Co., Ltd 2020 Y. Zhao, The River Fans Out, China Academic Library, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7724-6_7
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7 Historiography and Fiction in Chinese Culture
as the paramount paradigm to all cultural discourses, occupying the supreme position resembling religious canonized texts in other cultures. This almost absolute domination of historiography exercises great pressure on all genres of discourses, élite genres included. In poetry, for instance, historical allusions are so extensive that they take on an over-coding,2 making it interpretable only to professional readers. The pressure from historiography was strongly felt even in literary-language fiction, the only narrative genre other than history among all the cu
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