(This cover is a design sketch, to be adjusted and processed, the official publication shall prevail)
Innovate in integrity
-- Preface to "New Narratives: An Exploration of Chinese Narrative Culture".
The phrase "learning and innovation" is widely known, but there may be multiple answers to how to innovate. Thirty years ago, in view of the fact that the study of ancient Chinese narrative literature has followed the paradigm of stylistic history and writers' works as the main paradigm from the West over the past century, and the relationship between the story genre and the story genre of Chinese narrative literature, I proposed a research method of Chinese narrative culture to make up for this bottleneck with the study of story genres. When I started thinking about proposing and practicing this method, I was thinking more about a lot of practical issues, such as how to choose a topic, how to collect literature, how to do a cultural analysis of the story genre, and so on. With the continuous improvement of the methodology and practice of narrative culture, we have gradually begun to understand the academic theory and academic value of narrative culture from the inside and depth, especially the connotation and essence of the so-called academic innovation of narrative culture.
People who are familiar with Chinese narrative culture for the first time are more likely to have some misunderstandings without a comprehensive understanding of the full depth of narrative culture. The common denominator of these misunderstandings is that cognitive narrative culture is understood from a completely "Westernized" perspective. For example, some people, without a comprehensive understanding of cognition, rely on subjective conjecture to imagine narrative culture as the "wild fox Zen" that rigidly copied the concepts and methods of Western research in the 80s of the last century; some people take the word "narrative" in the name "Chinese narrative culture" for granted to understand the connotation and discipline affiliation of Chinese narrative culture from the perspective of Western narratology. In other words, Chinese narrative culture is understood as a method that adopts the basic theoretical framework of Western narratology to study Chinese narrative literature. Because of these misunderstandings, I gradually began to deeply reflect on and analyze the Chinese narrative culture that I had conceived. The focus of the consideration is whether the surname of Chinese narrative culture is "Zhong" or "Xi". If it is the surname "Zhong", how does it do it, or how can it be proved? The result of thinking is roughly as follows:
From the perspective of the subject-slave relationship between the original intention of proposing the theoretical method, the original intention of thinking about the Chinese narrative culture is not to take a Western academic concept paradigm and search for materials that conform to its conceptual paradigm in Chinese literature and materials, so as to prove the scientific and universal nature of its theoretical system. On the contrary, the first need to put forward and practice Chinese narrative culture is to solve the embarrassment and helplessness in the field of ancient Chinese narrative literature in the field of stylistic history and writers' works that have been used in the West for a century. In other words, as a genre of narrative literary stories composed of a variety of genres and the works of many writers, the traditional study of stylistic history and writers' works can only be separated according to the genre and the writer's works due to its methodological limitations. The story genre needs to find the appropriate research method according to its own morphological characteristics. In this sense, finding the right research method for the type of story is like setting up a tender for a construction team for a given research goal. Here, the subject being served is the type of story that is the subject form of Chinese narrative literature, and what method to use to serve this subject is obviously in an alternative object position. Therefore, whether it is the thematic studies from the West that narrative culture refers to and borrows, or the narratology that some scholars mistakenly believe is closely related to narrative culture, they are all participating (or possibly acting as) the winning party in the bidding for the construction of the main body of the narrative literary story genre. Their relationship with the type of story is the relationship between the service and the served, that is, the relationship between the subject and the object. Then, it seems that the inner color of Chinese narrative culture is still the root of the story type of Chinese narrative literature, which fully embodies the essence of Chinese literature. The purpose of absorbing and borrowing various methods and concepts from the West is to serve the root of the Chinese narrative literary story genre. Therefore, it is to create "new" in order to keep the "middle".
From the perspective of the steps and procedures of adopting specific methods, Chinese narrative culture is still an innovative method that adheres to the ontology of Chinese scholarship. Since the study of narrative culture originates from the tailor-made design of the theme type of narrative literature, its specific steps and procedures serve the needs of the study of story theme types. This is mainly manifested in two aspects:
First, from the perspective of the paradigm origin relationship of academic research methods, the paradigm system of Chinese narrative culture is roughly derived from Western thematic studies. This seems to be easy to give people the impression of putting on a Western vest, but after comparing and analyzing, you can see that its "body use" belongs. In addition to Chinese narrative culture, there are two ways to apply thematics in the study of Chinese literature: one is to adhere to the field of folk tale research of thematics itself, and use the "AT taxonomy" to classify and study the types of Chinese folk tales. For example, Ding Naitong's "Index to Chinese Folk Tale Themes", as well as related specific theme types of research. To be clear, the classification level of folk tales made by thematics is not the most specific case story, but a secondary unit composed of several specific cases. For example, Ding Naitong's "Index of Chinese Folk Tales Themes" in the second category of "general folk tales" No. 301F [treasure hunting], the description of this category is: "The hero goes down to the cave or down the cliff to get valuables, but after the treasure is hoisted up, the hero is left there." Under this category, the author lists specific case stories of the same kind collected from 16 types of documentary materials. These 16 case stories are the first level, and the "treasure hunt" is the second level. The second is to draw on and absorb the research spirit of thematology and conduct thematic imagery research on Chinese lyrical literature from the perspective of comparative literature, such as Chen Pengxiang's "Collection of Thematic Research Papers". In contrast, the study of folk tales can be regarded as a pure thematic, and it is completely "used in Western style". The study of imagery in lyrical literature has shaken the ontology of thematic research, and has transferred the thematic methods used in the field of folk tales to the field of ancient Chinese lyrical literature. This should be a big breakthrough. However, in terms of the scale and hierarchy of the theme, it is still basically in sync with the original thematics, that is, it adopts the perspective of the second level of imagery and theme. In contrast, the thematic analysis adopted by Chinese narrative culture is not from the second level of imagery, but from the basic underlying component of Chinese narrative literature, the type of individual story. The reason why this is so is that the story type, which is the basic constituent unit of Chinese narrative literature, is itself an independent literary phenomenon unit that embraces the evolution of several genres and various themes. Only by locking the focus of the theme in this position can we correctly open the deep thematic connotation of the story type, so as to correctly reveal the cultural theme variation reflected in the different forms of story types composed of different historical and documentary materials. Therefore, although Chinese narrative culture with the case story type as the basic theme research unit draws on the paradigm rules of thematic studies, its adjustment and change in the subject unit reflects its principle of "taking China as the body and the West as the use".
Second, from the perspective of the academic origins of academic research at the specific operational level, Chinese narrative culture studies proceeds from the needs of story genre research, and strives to pursue the principles of "fishing with all your might" and "catching everything in one net" in the collection of literature materials. The basic implication of this principle is that there is no threshold for any documentary material related to the type of story. Any material, any form, any content, any carrier material involved in the story genre is included in the collection and excavation. The difference between this approach and the original setting of the Thematic setting is that the ingestion level of the Thematic setting is the second level, and the total number of first-level stories under the second level is actually an unknown number to be discovered and supplemented, so it is not yet possible to determine how many first-level stories there are under the genre of "treasure hunting". In this way, it is determined that the second level of literature collection of thematic studies cannot be exhaustive. However, the thematic research of lyrical literature is still concerned with the second-level imagery theme composed of several first-level works, such as "twilight theme", "revenge theme" and "negative heart theme", which are composed of several first-level works. However, the number of first-level works under each theme is still the same as the thematic study of folktales, and there is no goal setting of exhaustive literature. The difference between Chinese narrative culture and them is that it does not focus on the second level, but on the specific case stories of the first level, such as "The Story of Meng Jiangnu", "The Story of Wang Zhaojun", "The Story of the West Chamber" and so on. Because the specific case stories in the first level have a clear scope, in order to make a profound cultural exploration and summary of them, it is necessary to exhaust their documentary materials in a carpet comprehensive way. The academic origin of this method is from the ancient literature and classics of the Han Dynasty to the rigorous tradition of the Qianjia school of the Qing Dynasty. Liang Qichao summed up this tradition as "collecting tens of millions of books", and the concept of "fishing with all your might" and "catching them all" proposed by Chinese narrative culture is also the concrete implementation of the tradition of "collecting tens of millions of books". Therefore, it is undoubtedly the inheritance of the authentic traditional Chinese method of learning. At the same time, this method of narrative culture is also a breakthrough and development in the study of ancient Chinese narrative literature. Regarding the case stories of ancient narrative literature, starting from the older generation of scholars such as Zhao Jingshen and Hu Shiying, there have been many achievements in the study of the homology relationship of opera novels. From the perspective of literature collection, this method has some similarities with the literature collection of case stories in narrative culture. But there are also significant differences. The similarity lies in the fact that both of them pay attention to the evolution of different texts of the same story theme type in ancient Chinese narrative literature, and the difference is that the literature materials of the previous scholars' research on the homology relationship of opera novels are mainly limited to novels, operas and related historical biographical notes, etc., and the literature from other sources is less involved. The collection of case stories in Chinese narrative culture is more extensive and in-depth. In this sense, the study of narrative culture is indeed another breakthrough and innovation for the study of the homology relationship of traditional opera novels.
From the perspective of the role of academic history in putting forward theories, narrative culture is a serious practice of advocating the return of the academic tradition of "Chinese style and Western use". Since the twentieth century, with the rapid entry of Western culture and scholarship into the field of Chinese academic brother and become the dominant paradigm, an academic atmosphere with Western academic paradigm as the mainstream has formed in the entire Chinese academic community. On the one hand, this process introduced the essence of Western academic culture to China, which to a large extent made up for the shortcomings and deficiencies of traditional Chinese scholarship, and gradually became the mainstream of Chinese scholarship over the past century. Over the past century, the positive effects of the mainstream Western academic paradigm in China have been basically realized, and the part of its incompatibility with local research objects in China should be paid attention to, and solutions should be found to improve it. It is in this sense that Chinese narrative culture studies hopes to undertake its due academic and historical mission. From the perspective of the academic history of the study of ancient Chinese narrative literature, before the Ming and Qing dynasties, it was basically only scattered research, lacking scale and systematic research. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the prevalence and prosperity of novels and operas gave birth to and promoted the scale and system of the study of novels and operas. Its main research paradigm is critical research. Although the scale of the evaluation research has been formed, it is limited by the materials and methods, and the research fields involved are also quite limited. Since the twentieth century, the study of stylistic history and writers' works from the West has gradually replaced the previous research on narrative literature criticism and has become the mainstream of the study of narrative literature in ancient China. On the positive side, the study of stylistic history and writers' works does have a wide range of coverage and in-depth exploration of the system and connotation of ancient Chinese narrative literature that previous critical studies do not have, and it has also greatly promoted the process of integrating the study of ancient Chinese narrative literature with international standards. However, with the operation of a century of scholarship, some inconsistencies between the study of stylistic history and writers' works and the research objects of ancient Chinese narrative literature have gradually begun to surface. One of the most prominent is its disagreement with the important form and style of ancient Chinese narrative literature-the story type. Because the story genre is composed of several genres and writers' works, the study of stylistic history and writers' works can only study the genres and writers' works corresponding to oneself in the story genre, ignoring other genres and writers' works. In this way, the whole story genre is invisibly dismembered and separated. It is precisely for this reason that the study of story genres in narrative culture studies conducts a comprehensive coverage study of all genres of story genres and all writers' works, so as to make up for and solve the shortcomings and deficiencies of story genres in the study of stylistic history and writers' works. On the one hand, it is true that it solves the bottleneck and obstacle problem in the study of story genres in Chinese narrative literature itself, but from a larger perspective, this practice itself is also a return from "Western style in China" to "Chinese style and Western use" in terms of research paradigm. It inspires people that the Western paradigm that has dominated Chinese scholarship since the 20th century should come to reflect and find its own way of walking.
The articles included in this book are a compilation of all my own best articles on Chinese narrative culture over the past 30 years, ranging from theoretical reflections on narrative culture to method introduction, to case analysis and summary review. These essays should be a concrete demonstration and expression of the above three thoughts, and should also be regarded as a comprehensive summary of my own research on Chinese narrative culture.
After 30 years of dismal business, I finally have the courage to publish all the best articles, although this courage comes from 30 years of unremitting efforts and a little bit of confidence, I dare not be presumptuous. But at the same time, there is also a sense of apprehension and an expectation. I am worried that although I have been exploring and practicing it for 30 years, I still dare not believe that it can become a scientific research system paradigm that can be followed by future generations. Therefore, I am particularly looking forward to the fact that if my academic peers, experts and scholars can give me advice and insight, I will feel fortunate and grateful for my 30 years of hard work.
Ning Jiayu
The first draft was published on January 15, 2023, and revised on December 7, 2023
(This article was published in the first issue of "Reading Books" in 2024, which will be published by Tianjin People's Publishing House)