Whose Strange Stories? P'u Sung-ling (1640 - East Asian History

WHOSE STRANGE STORIES?
native critics and by Chinese readers of
modern times in general 4 For in order to Figure 8
ask the question "How should this story be Title page from a fine early edition of The Garden of Cyrus
translated?" or "How has it been translated?,"
we inevitably find ourselves asking
"What does it really mean, and how is it,
and was it, supposed to be read?"-and
thereby we may find ourselves discovering
a new way of reading, and of bringing the
stories alive again. All of this requires a
bold leap of the imagination. To turn Said
on his head, this unusually roundabout
and difficult rebirth is an unashamed
process of reappropriation, of once again
making the stories one's own, their own.5
Here, as a first rereading, we present
one of Giles' versions-"Miss Lien-hsiang,
the Fox-girl" (Lien-hsiang W )6-taken
apart, with reference to the Chinese
"original," and carefully put back together
again, reconstituted in as generous a surrounding
medium as possible. This literary
4 Following the demise and discrediting of the
traditional Chinese reading universe (the May
Fourth syndrome), there has been a widespread
unwillingness and incapacity amongst the
Chinese intelligentsia to read any of its own
huge classical repertoire of pi-chi liter­
ature-all the more so if it happened to deal
with the supernatural (as was the case with the
entire subdivision entitled chih-kuai ;E;'i,£).
This led to a more general unquestioning
assumption that such literature was not worth
reading. This in its turn caused such readers as
did bother with it either to distort it (decades
of politicisation), or to trivialise it (reducing its
powerful themes to silly, infantile, almost
meaningless cliches). (There were notable
exceptions to this broad generalisation.)
Readers of recent pai-hua B I!i versions of
the Liaa-chai stories, and viewers of many of
the film and TV adaptations, are being treated
to something that has as little connection with
P'u Sung-ling's original texts as Buffy the
vampire slayer. Recently, a few modernist
critics (including the Freudian critic Wang 1chia
.:E and the novelist Wang Wen­
hsing .:E)( in Taiwan, and the poet/
essayist Leung Ping-Kwan *tJ in Hong
/Kong) have begun to comment intelligently on
the surprisingly modern and powerful qualities
of P'u Sung-ling's fiction. As Leung observed to
me recently, "Why have we been making all
this fuss about South American literature? We
have our own magical literature right here!"
Ironically, it may bepi-chi literature that proves
to be the most "post-modern" of all Chinese
genres.
5 Surely original and translation, readings East
and West, all reside together with equal
legitimacy in that universal imaginative universe
so well described by Marcel Proust, a universe
that belongs to us all: "Celle de toutes les
diverses vies que nous me nons parallelement,
qui est la plus pleine de peripeties, la plus
riche en episodes, je veux dire la vie intellectuelle."
See p.71 of the superb cartoon
adaptation of Du cote de chez Swann, done
with extraordinary sensitivity by Stephane
Heuet (Paris: Delcourt, 1999),
6 While this introduction records joint
reflections, the reconstruction itself is the work
of Tong Man. The Chinese text followed is that
of the Ch 'iian-pen hsin-chu ::