All Men Are Brothers – [Shui Hu Chuan] – Intro #4

All Men Are Brothers – [Shui Hu Chuan] – Intro #4

Translated by Pearl S. Buck

I. Introduction by Lin Yutang – Part 4

To appreciate the literary qualities and limitations of the novel as novel, one should understand it against the background of the rise of the novel in China, and the genesis of this novel in particular. The present novel, called in Chinese Shui Hu Chuan, is essentially the story of a hundred and eight robbers of Liangshanpo (thirty-six major and seventy-two minor ones), woven together by a great imaginative writer out of a body of anecdotes and incidents told at first in tea houses and dramatized on the stage. In the course of the development of this cycle, incidents have been shifted about, the conception and delineation of the characters have changed, a different emphasis has been assigned to this or that character, and even the personal and family names of some of the heroes have undergone slight variations. The author or authors of this novel have given the characters flesh and blood and they have more or less successfully  welded the tremendous material of this legend into a continuous narrative, not without here and there letting it lapse into stories of an episodic character.

The genesis of the novel in its present form is also partly the story of the rise of the modern novel in China. The novel was late in coming in Chinese literature, for the dead classical language, encased in stereotyped clichés, in which the Chinese scholars wrote, was highly inadequate to the telling of stories, particularly in dialogue. Dr. Hun Shih, who did pioneering research on the growth and transformation of this novel, says,” The seventy-chapter edition of All Men Are Brothers is not only the culmination of four hundred years of telling the Shui-hu cycle of stories, but also opens an era marking the complete maturity of Chinese vernacular literature.”

The story of the Liangshanpo robbers was first told by mouth by professional story-tellers. As I have already suggested, the Hsuanho Chronicles was based on a number of professional story-tellers’ words. Su Tungpo, who died some twenty years before the death of Sung Chiang and who incidentally comes in the first chapter of this novel, wrote in his Journal: “Wang Peng once said: Often parents annoyed by the playing children in the alleys, would give them money and ask them to go and listen to the story-tellers telling ancient tales. The listeners to the tales of the Three Kingdoms knit their brow and shed tears when they hear Liu Pei defeated and laugh in satisfaction when they hear Ts’ao Ts’ao worsted. This shows that the effect of the lives of good and bad men lives long after them.”

In Su Tungpo’s time, Emperor Jentsung in the 11th century was said to have asked some one to tell him one story a day. In the 12th century, special story-tellers were attached to the court, and Emperor Hsiaotsung (1163-1189) was reported to have sent people to collect stories from the country and tell him one every day. There are 2 books describing the life of the capital of southern Sung (Hangchow) and 1 book describing that of the capital of northern Sung (Kaifeng) in those days. They tell us there were puppet shows, shadow plays, sound mimicry, verse games and riddles given by public entertainers, as well as story-telling by professionals. Moreover, the story-tellers specialized in their respective fields. There were tellers of short stories, of religious tales, and of historical romances. Some of these short stories are preserved, as in Chingpen T’ungshu Hsiaoshuo, and are among the best that I have come across. I find that the short story in its Chinese form and in the vernacular was as good in the Sung Dynasty as those in the Ming Dynasty and thus it is almost impossible to speak of a “growth” of the short story, as Somerset Maugham remarks, in his preface to Tellers of Tales, regarding the western short story. The religious stories were the predecessors of Hsuan-chuang’s Travels and the Hsiyuchi, and the historical romances were the predecessors of the Three Kingdoms and All Men Are Brothers. Naturally the wars and turmoil during periods of change of dynasties provided the best natural background for the historical romances, and we find they outstripped the rest in quantity and importance. Today we have an edition of 5 historical romances dealing with different historical epochs, published between 1321 and 1323. These were no more than story-tellers’ copy. The language was often crude, the story-telling simple and the characterization weak. The Hsuanho Chronicles undoubtedly belongs to this category.

<Continued – part 5>