How to Read Chinese Prose: A Guided Anthology
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: For the English-reading student interested in learning about the nuances of nonfictional Chinese prose, there are relatively few resources to turn to for systematic study.1 Although many literary anthologies and textbooks carefully engage with pre-Qin, Han, and sometimes later historical and philosophical prose, once one moves past the early period, most books tend to shift focus to other types of literature. Often they will emphasize newly developed or refined genres, engaging with the most widely appreciated genres of an era while paying scant attention to the continued and evolving use of prose. How to Read Chinese Prose, edited by Zong-qi Cai, aims to ameliorate this issue by providing readers with extensive analysis of many different variations of “artistic, nonfiction prose” (1) from across the Chinese literary tradition.Cai notes a variety of reasons for the lack of attention given to prose, from the fact that variant forms are hard to distinguish (suffering from what Cai calls “the dearth of distinct form markers” [2]) to the fact that the concerns addressed in prose were simply viewed as less important by Sinologists. Prose is also beset by another major problem when read in translation: English readers are bound to encounter the “translational homogenization of Chinese prose,” in which important characteristics found within the original works are often rendered illegible by translation. This can lead to a mistaken perception of sameness within prose across both time and genre.There are many complexities in learning, or teaching, Chinese prose, not least of which is that prose is nearly entirely missing the clear bibliographic categories we find in other forms of writing. This is a clear downstream effect of the lack of distinct form markers, which leads bibliographers to divide prose into categories centered on “content, function, or context of composition” (3). Given this reality, Cai proposes a new theoretical framework organizing prose into four broad categories: narrative, discursive, descriptive, and communicative. Cai further refines these genres according to “extratextual” and “textual” organizational patterns. These patterns evolve across time, with textual patterning in particular developing increased complexity through history. In essence, Cai is proposing a new way of thinking about both the shared and divergent characteristics of Chinese prose in an effort to break the conceptual logjam facing readers of Chinese prose.The volume itself, in the same series as such other extremely useful works as How to Read Chinese Poetry and How to Read Chinese Drama, deftly pairs literary analysis with translations set against the original text.2 In many cases, the original text is marked up to highlight patterns and to emphasize the conceptual framework Cai proposes in the introduction. This has the striking effect of making the parallelism and repetition otherwise obfuscated by translation more legible.The first chapter of the volume, “Anatomy of the Chinese Prose Form,” does an excellent job of providing specific evidence for Cai's theoretical arguments, and it would behoove the reader to dwell a while on this section of the book. The key to understanding Cai's distinction between extratextual patterning and textual patterning is that extratextual patterning, commonly found in narrative works, refers to any kind of organizational structure that does not emerge directly from the grammatical or linguistic structure of the characters on the page.3 To illustrate this nontextual patterning, Cai notes that in many cases the Zuozhuan alternatively juxtaposes narrative with dialogue to great effect. Textual patterning, on the other hand, emerges from the “regular recurrence of textual elements: repeated words, phrases, or sentences; and correspondence (prosodic, morphological, semantic, or syntactic) between two couple lines or twin lines” (22).The rest of the volume works through a variety of types of prose documents roughly divided by period of creation, from an engagement with pre-Qin historical prose to a discussion of Ming and Qing occasional prose. The organization of the volume is chronological-thematic, but like the other volumes in the How to Read series, the tables of contents provide several alternate organizational schemata: there is a thematic table of contents as well as a table based on patterning. In aggregate, they allow an adventurous reader to approach the text from multiple angles, including according to Cai's proposed generic framework.How to Read Chinese Prose is of uniformly high quality, and each chapter covers multiple exemplars of distinct types of prose and offers impressive literary insight. Yet there are two prominent high points that I feel make this work an invaluable resource for any student of Chinese prose working primarily in English. As Cai notes in his introduction, and as I've discussed above, there are many complexities in successfully rendering Chinese prose into English in a manner that preserves its diverse nature. This diversity emerges most clearly in the sections on the Tang and Song dynasties, a very bright spot in a very strong volume. The various contributors present works in a variety of genres written by an overlapping set of authors. The effect of seeing the same person writing in distinct modes offers a wonderful opportunity to consider how an author's voice can change by genre. One can see, for example, the marked difference in tone in Han Yu's expository “On the Origin of the Way” versus his rather kindly reply to a letter from Li Yi. Similarly, we are treated to distinct writings from Liu Zongyuan and Su Shi.For me the other highlight of How to Read Chinese Prose lies in its engagement with oft-neglected forms of prose writing. Of all the genres of prose dealt with within the book, I am most delighted to see a detailed treatment of the eight-legged essay, which has faced extensive derision. Despite the perception of the eight-leg essay form as a stilted and uninspired genre, it was nevertheless one of the most important forms of writing in the late imperial period. This is the first textbook I have encountered that delves deeply into it. Through two very distinct examples, the chapter “Ming and Qing Eight-Legged Essays” highlights how the form could be used seriously (by walking through a complex example by the late Ming scholar Chen Zilong) or in jest (as is the case with a “playful” example by the early Qing literatus You Tong).How to Read Chinese Prose succeeds in its goal of highlighting the remarkable diversity of Chinese prose forms by taking readers through everything from biographical sketches to funerary texts and correspondence among friends. There are, however, a few small typographical issues that may introduce some confusion in readers. It is unfortunate that the very first text, “Zhu Zhiwu Convinced the Qin Army to Retreat,” is missing the structural markup that enables the success of so much of the book. Unfortunately, in the 2022 edition of the work “the three consecutive negations in the last paragraph (indicated by straight underline)” are not underlined, and the “proper names of people or places (marked by boldface)” are not marked by boldface (15). This is admittedly a very small issue, and the patterns are appropriately highlighted in most places in the work. However, this may unfortunately prime people to look past the markup where it is shown elsewhere.There is a clear audience for this book, and it very successfully addresses it. Intermediate to advanced students of Chinese literature and instructors in the Anglophone world will all find How to Read Chinese Prose extraordinarily useful. While I do think that the book is generally accessible to students who do not read Chinese, some of the more nuanced points related to patterning may be difficult to grasp for anyone who does not read Chinese well and is using the book without the guidance of an instructor. As such, teachers who choose to use this as a textbook will need to spend careful effort in working through the initial discussions of prose genres and patterning. How to Read Chinese Prose is bound to become an indispensable resource for any dedicated reader of classical literature, and it is an excellent piece of scholarship all around.
Source: Prism
Author: Paul Vierthaler
Institution: Princeton University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411634799