2.2 How the first Chinese novel came into being

In Chinese, “Xiaoshuo” (literally translated as “small talk”) is the general name used to refer to short stories, novellas and novels. Xiaoshuo in China can be understood as the unofficial records of history written for and enjoyed by ordinary people (Zhou 2008: 9-10). Collections of short stories began to appear as early as late Han Dynasty (25—220). Before the Tang Dynasty (618—907), short stories were only brief sketches of people or things or scores of words (Wang & Wang 2009: 207). In the Tang Dynasty (618—907) and the Song Dynasty (960—1279), short stories became quite popular among the commoners, although prose and poetry remained the main literary forms for intellectuals. For various reasons, however, the time and conditions were not ripe for the novel until the fourteenth century.

Since the Song Dynasty, significant cultural shifts took place in the Chinese society. Song rulers carried through reforms to make education more accessible to commoners, fostering more readers and writers. Printing developed as a commercial enterprise and made the written word much more widely available. In the increasingly commercial economy during and after the Song Dynasty, merchants and landowners outside the nobility gained power and supported new forms of entertainment. The Mongols conquered China and replaced the Song with the Yuan Dynasty (1279—1368), alienating a group of scholars who refused to participate in the new regime. The interests of these scholars, which included literature, became an important means to express their identity as a semi-autonomous social group. With that new identity, expressions of independence from conventional, state-supported literary values emerged. Public storytelling gradually became fashionable and writers or performers themselves wrote down the episodes which, over time, developed into lengthy works (cf. Gunn 2008).

Nobel Laureate for literature Pearl S. Buck gave a vivid description of the birth of the Chinese novel in her Nobel Lecture on 12 December 1938:

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.

[...]

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.

Buck (1938)

Proof that the traditional Chinese novel originated from storytelling can be seen in many examples. For example, words such as “且说” (cf. Example 2.1) and “却说” (cf. Example 2.2) are used frequently in the novel. “说” (“shuo”) means “talk” or “speak”, indicating the story is being told orally. But neither of the translations rendered this word literally, as illustrated in the examples below.

Example 2.1

(Chapter 1 of Sanguo Yanyi,emphasis added)

ST：且说张角一军，前犯幽州界分。

T1: It is now time to turn to Chang Chio. He led his army into Yuchow the northern of the eight divisions of the country.

T2: As for Zhang Jue's army, it began advancing on Youzhou district.

Example 2.2

(Chapter 1, emphasis added)

ST：却说玄德引关、张来颍川，听得喊杀之声，又望见火光烛天，……

T1: We return now to Yuan-te. He and his brothers were hastening toward the point of danger when they heard the din of battle and saw flames rising high toward the sky.

T2: Meanwhile Xuande and his brothers neared Yingchuan, hurrying toward the roar of battle and the glowing night horizon.

Further evidence of the oral origins of Chinese novels can be found at the end of each chapter of a typical novel, where the reader is addressed directly. For instance, in the first three of the four classics, the reader is told to wonder about something—along the lines of “if you want to know what happens next, you have to listen to the following chapter to find out.”The reader is urged to listen to,not to read the next installment, which emphasizes the oral tradition. Example 2.3 is the last sentence of the first chapter of Sanguo Yanyi.This again clearly indicates that the novel originated from stories told orally in a series of episodes.

Example 2.3

(Chapter 1, emphasis added)

ST： 毕竟董卓性命如何，且听下文分解。

T1: Tung Cho's fate will be unrolled in later chapters.

T2: Did Zhang Fei kill the Imperial Corps commander? Read on.

The word-for-word translation of this sentence would be: “Will Dong Zhuo die or be killed?Please listen to the section that follows.”