| This dissertation explores the poetics of the Chinese novel by focusing on the relationship between the prefatory poems and the prose narrative in the sixteenth-century novel, the Chin P'ing Mei tz'u-hua. It begins by incorporating the poems within the tz'u-hua text through a close analysis of such verbal evidence as repetition and intertextual allusions. This analysis not only establishes the chronological priority of the tz'u-hua over the Ch'ung-chen recension, it also reveals contrasting aesthetic approaches between the two editions. Whereas the approach of the tz'u-hua author is dialogic, in that conflicting perspectives are raised for evaluation in the prefatory poems and elsewhere in the narrative, the later editor's approach is monologic, since his revisions attempt to unify perspective and clarify philosophical ambiguity. The later editor, sharing the views of those conservative members of the literati class who appropriated vernacular fiction to transmit elite values directly to the broad public, replaced the poems in order to write down to his readers. The tz'u-hua author experimented with his literary tradition by fusing classical aesthetics with vernacular forms, and was thus writing up to a sophisticated audience. The active engagement by the reader necessary to interpret the various and sometimes antagonistic relations between verbal events in the tz'u-hua text, while expected in classical prose and poetry, is revolutionary in the vernacular tradition. The demands placed upon the reader as an active participant in the generation of meaning restores the connection between literature and the process of Confucian self-cultivation. Rather than being a product of collective authorship in the popular tradition, as is still widely believed, this study argues that the Chin P'ing Mei was written by a single, highly educated author who painstakingly adapted and transformed a broad range of material from the entire literary tradition. The self-conscious manipulation of borrowed language, in addition to the dialogic interaction of various levels of narrative discourse--which allows for the presence of doubt and ambiguity in the interplay of cultural tensions--provide the terms for the discussion of the Chin P'ing Mei as a "novel."... |
