巴莫曲布嫫

JFR Book Review


Chinese Storytellers:
Life and Art in the Yangzhou Tradition

By Vibeke Børdahl andamp; Jette Ross. 2002. Boston: Cheng & Tsui Company. iv + 404 pages.
Reviewed by Aaron Tate, Cornell University
[Review length: 570 words • Review posted in 2004]

Building on her massive study The Oral Tradition of Yangzhou Storytelling (Curzon Press, 1996), Vibeke Børdahl has now collaborated with photographer Jette Ross to produce an elaborate introduction to storytelling found in the southern Chinese city of Yangzhou, where living narrative performance of extraordinarily long prose tales continues to flourish.

The book opens with a discussion designed to acquaint the reader with the ancient tradition of Chinese storytelling as well as the particular richness of the Yangzhou tradition itself. Nearly every page of the one-hundred-page introductory section is replete with photographs taken during performance, reproductions of Chinese art relevant to the stories, photographs of performance venues and ritual implements, and diagrams of the storytellers’ genealogies. Key words, special diction from the narratives themselves, and other illustrative headings are provided in Chinese and English throughout the book’s margins; they provide orientation amidst the labyrinth of material. Børdahl’s early linguistic work in Chinese dialectology and many years of fieldwork among storytellers in Yangzhou place her in a unique position to explicate the classic topoi of performance-centered research: the local community and the storytellers’ milieu, the performance context, questions of transmission, the role of teacher-student or master-disciple relationships, and the performance event itself. The view afforded by Børdahl’s access to material spanning thirty years of transmission opens a particularly rich diachronic picture of the tradition.

In the second chapter, Børdahl provides life histories of the seven storytellers whose tales form. the centerpiece of the book. One can, in effect, turn back and forth from the biographies to the tales themselves, and can then refer to the countless illustrations and photographs of the tellers and venues in order to thicken the context of the performance-centered texts. Thanks to an innovative and reader-friendly formatting of image and text, the storytellers’ personae emerge in vivid and unpredictable ways.

In the third chapter, “Three Sagas of Yangzhou Storytelling,” the reader will find excerpts transcribed from each of the three most celebrated Chinese story cycles: “Water Margin,” “Three Kingdoms,” and “Journey to the West.” The stories are given first in English translation, and are followed by the Chinese original, each of which Børdahl herself transcribed from individual performances. In one case, the author offers two versions of the same introductory episode, “Wu Song Fights the Tiger,” separated by thirty years: the one told by the father, Wang Shaotang (the founder of the Wang School of the Water Margin tradition), the other told by his student and son (Wang Xiaotang). Thus, a reader may judge for herself the degree of fixity and variation at play in one of the most famous episodes in the cycle.

The attention to detail lavished by the authors and publisher on this volume have rendered it something of an event in the world of Chinese folklore publications, and should place it among the most progressive and smartly laid-out textualization projects produced in recent memory. The hallmark of the project’s methodology may well be the fact that the authors were able to include five of the seven stories in the book on an accompanying VCD. In addition to this visual footage, the VCD also includes an introduction to the town of Yangzhou and scenes from the storyteller’s milieu. The book will be a watershed for specialists in Chinese verbal art, a welcome contribution for specialists in orally transmitted narrative, and a delight for the general reader with an interest in Chinese culture.

Posted on the JFR Website