Chinese Martial Arts Fiction: High or Low Culture?
The status of martial arts fiction and culture is problematic. Since its explosion into the Western world in the 1970s it has always seemed to have been on a rather meteoric descent – a dazzling bright light, heading downwards. It certainly precipitated a transformation in body culture, in outlooks, in fantasies, literacies and activities, but the spectre haunting any and every appearance of martial arts 'culture' has always been the spectre of ridiculousness. I have discussed this at length in Theorizing Bruce Lee (Bowman 2010), and don't want to cover the same ground again. Suffice it to say that reactions to the song 'Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting' still capture reactions to all things martial arts: delight, amusement, enjoyment but intellectual disparagement… Of course, behind the scenes, so to speak, and just like Hong Kong martial arts films themselves, even the song 'Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting' deserves a lot more respect than it is commonly given. Why? Forget Donna Summer, and never mind Saturday Night Fever, the song that catapulted disco into the centre of global popular culture was – you've guessed it – 'Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting'. And what is this first truly international disco hit about? The answer is in the title. It is about the kung fu craze, sparked (though neither set in motion nor masterminded) by Bruce Lee. Moreover, the cultural-crossover and cross-cultural desire registered in this song both captures and mainstreams (indeed, domesticates, hegemonizes or captures) some of the main cultural-political significance of the kung fu craze – its potential for cross-cultural identification and bonding (Brown 1997). Again, I discussed this in Beyond Bruce Lee (Bowman 2013).
Despite all of this, one comic sketch by the artist David Shrigley sums up perhaps the main problem: the legend below the drawing states something like 'anyone over the age of 16 who attends a martial class is suffering from mental health issues'. The drawing above shows a line of children in something like the Shotokan gedan barai block in horse stance. In the middle of the line is an adult male in the same stance, wearing the same sort of gi, with a bandana around his head. And this says it all: to the non-martial artist, martial arts practice is basically ultimately ludicrous.
In other words, to reiterate: no matter how bright the martial arts star ever blazes, it quickly plummets down in cultural status. Indeed, as Leon Hunt asks in his study Kung Fu Cult Masters (Hunt 2003), even when Westerners love Hong Kong martial arts films, what are they loving? Might their delight in martial arts films be a delight not only in the lowbrow but also the orientalist – given that the mainstay of martial arts films is the solving of problems through simple violence? At the same time, Westerners who have championed the values and virtues of Eastern martial arts cultural productions may themselves be regarded as somewhat deluded.
If this is the West, what of the East? Petrus Liu's book Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Literature and Postcolonial History (Liu 2011) plots an interestingly familiar downward trajectory for martial arts literature (and film) in and around China. The irony is that, before the 1920s and 1930s, martial arts literature in China had held a longstanding position as being both central and canonical in the world of Chinese 'high' literary culture:
As indicated by James Liu's important and massive 1967 study, The Chinese Knight-Errant, the philosophy of martial arts has permeated and dominated virtually every form of premodern Chinese literature for over two thousand years: philosophical treatises, shi and ci poetry, dynastic histories, zawen ('miscellaneous writings'), songs, Tang chuanqi (legends), Ming drama, and prose fiction. Indeed, two of the so-called Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese Literature (sida qishu) are explicit representations of the culture of martial arts: Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and despite being proto-martial arts novels, the two fourteenth-century classics have never been relegated to the status of popular fiction. (9)
However, from the 1920s onwards, Liu demonstrates, Chinese martial arts literature was attacked and disparaged by various parties, because it occupied a problematic position vis-à-vis nation building and modernization. It was denounced as lowbrow popular fiction, despite being written in a classical Chinese language unintelligible to all but the most highly educated. Thus, Liu argues: 'The label of popular fiction was … strictly a May Fourth construction. Before the rise of modernization discourse and developmental thinking in China, martial arts narratives were not seen as popular or even middle-brow fiction, but part of China's high literary canon'. Indeed, he continues: 'The culture of martial arts has always been a normative and privileged theme in Chinese literature' (9). Nonetheless, during 'the May Fourth crusade against martial arts fiction', the genre was conflated 'with "mandarin ducks and butterflies" (yuanyang hudie pai) fiction, stories about love published in Saturday and other less respected venues' (9).
The reasons for the May Fourth reformers crusade against martial arts literature was not its existence per se, but its continued existence in a time when the agenda was being driven by the desire to reform, modernize and nationalize:
We can see that what May Fourth reformers objected to was not martial arts narratives as such, but the existence of such narratives in the twentieth century. Both Mao Zedong and Lu Xun wrote approvingly of premodern narratives of outlaws and martial valor, which they considered to be an expression of the people's heroic struggles against feudal values, while accusing the modern descendants of the same works of corrupting the minds of the Chinese masses and blocking their revolutionary consciousness. (10)
Thus, martial arts literature and culture was represented and reconstituted as something lowbrow, anti-modern, anachronistic and politically regressive. In 1932 martial arts films were banned in China, and martial arts fiction tout court 'was banned by both the Communist Party in China and the Nationalist government in Taiwan after 1949' (10). Subsequently:
In post-1949 mainland China, members of the League of Leftist Writers assumed leading positions in the PRC's cultural bureaucracy and published literary histories that canonized (socialist) realism as 'modern Chinese literature'. Nonrealist trends in early twentieth-century China, such as martial arts fiction, were removed from literary history. The story of modern Chinese literature and Chinese modernity was subsequently told as a unilinear movement toward realism and Europeanized syntax, a feat accomplished through the translations, introductions, and appropriations of Western thought. (10)
With these clampdowns in both Mainland China and Taiwan, 'Hong Kong became the new center for martial arts film and literature after 1949, although Taiwan also produced a significant number of talented and prolific authors despite censorship'. Indeed, Liu notes, 'literary historian Lin Bao-chun actually considers the early period under martial law (1961-1970) to be Taiwan's "golden age of martial arts literature"' (10).
This is an interesting history. It is not as widely known in the West (and maybe also in the East) as it could be. However, this could be changing. Liu devotes a lot of space to the consideration of the 'Jin Yong phenomenon' – namely, the recent explosion of interest in and accolades showered upon the contemporary martial arts novelist, whose work has led to something of a renaissance and discursive revaluation of the status of martial arts literature. But, for Liu, the implications of the revaluation of Chinese literary history provoked by interest in Jin Yong are more far reaching than mere canon revision:
The 'Jin Yong phenomenon', as critics are now calling it, signifies more than an emerging literary canon or merely changing conditions of literary evaluation. Comprehended historically, the rise of martial arts studies has profound implications for postcolonial studies and our understanding of what constitutes a colonial situation. While a previous generation of scholars tended to understand colonialism in a more literal sense as territorial occupation, we are now much more aware of colonialism's discursive workings in the production of identities and subject positions. Newer postcolonial theory has taught us to recognize the ways in which colonialism reproduces itself as the anticolonial nationalist elite's attitude toward their own past. As the subaltern studies scholar Partha Chatterjee argues, the dominant West not only colonizes non-Western peoples and territories, but their imagination as well. Martial arts literature provides an opportunity for us to reevaluate the assumption, promulgated since the May Fourth period, that Chinese modernity could only be attained through the negation and destruction of its own traditions. Martial arts literature challenges our conventional sense that literary modernity belonged to those 'iconoclasts' who promoted the Europeanization of the Chinese language. The submerged political history of martial arts literature reveals one of the modes in which a desire for the West and its rationalism colonized Chinese intellectuals' consciousness in their self-appointed roles as saviors of the nation. For Liu Zaifu, Jin Yong's achievements and the reasons for his newfound canonicity reside precisely in his ability to develop an 'anti-Europeanized Chinese writing' against the May Fourth enlightenment ideology and Europeanized sentence structures, and Jin Yong's writing has succeeded in preserving China's 'accumulated cultural treasures'. (14-15)
Now, this is an expansive and effusive passage. However, I tend to suspect that this representation of the matter actually circles back around behind Liu's argument and allows the thing he is arguing against to enter through the back door. For, Liu is hostile to the reading of Chinese literature in terms of nationalism, but yet here it is, coming to the forefront of attention, in the form of a rethinking of the postcolonial as what thinkers like Fredric Jameson, Haile Gerima, Vijay Prashad, and others, have constructed as a decolonizing of colonized consciousness (Prashad 2001). At this point, one wonders about the status of Liu's earlier polemical distancing and differencing from critics who read martial arts culture under the sign of nationalism.
Of course, to adhere to Liu's own contentions about martial arts literature, it is absolutely wrong to approach this in an all or nothing manner. Liu himself is concerned with the internal textual, narrative and generic features of martial arts literature, and is dead against the ignoring of these elements in the name of grouping it all together as pro- or anti-nationalist or pro- or anti-capitalist, and so on.
Rather, Liu insists upon two important things. The first is the literariness of martial arts literature. The second is the range of possible relations, groupings, identifications and practices that it can precipitate. Of the first, he writes:
Martial arts texts' concern with literariness is foregrounded by the recurring motif of the 'Secret Scripture' (miji). A standard formula in wuxia films and novels, the Secret Scripture is a lost or carefully guarded ancient text that endows its owner with superhuman combat abilities; the competition or quest for this book forms the main plot of many wuxia stories. Significantly, the Secret Scripture is not a training manual with pictorial illustrations of martial moves, but a verbal text written in Classical Chinese (or sometimes in Sanskrit). The Secret Scripture contains instructions that guide the protagonist through a series of inner or spiritual transformations, which is, however, possible only if the protagonist is literate – that is, if the character has access to what in the real world would be termed the educational capital of the dominant class. (11)
Liu emphasizes 'the genre's advocacy of book learning as the source of martial power' (12) in order to impress upon us the fact that the genre was not merely read by the educated classes, but also that it has long been self-reflexive about its literariness. It is a literary genre that values literature. Its stock figures with the highest skills have an ineradicable relationship to literature. In his words: 'Wuxia is a self-consciously literary discourse that draws attention to the aesthetic properties of language'. Moreover, one of its effects was 'to translate classical Chinese literary and cosmological concepts into a large corpus of easily quotable, memorable phrases'. So influential has this movement from the literary into the popular cultural realm of everyday discourse that many 'wuxia phrases have by now become endemic in speech situations unrelated to martial arts' (12). Over two pages, Liu indicates some of the most common everyday expressions that are used in Chinese conversation, advertising, politics, and journalism that derive directly from martial arts literature (12-13).
If the seeping into Chinese language in all contexts of its use of terms and expressions from martial arts literature provides evidence of the strange unacknowledged or disavowed centrality of martial arts literature to contemporary Chinese culture, Liu hammers this point home by noting that even contemporary martial arts film comedies are structured by ideas that are only funny to the extent that the literariness of martial arts literature is known. Thus, he writes:
The narrative tradition of the Secret Scripture is the subject of Stephen Chow's critically acclaimed 2004 parody of the genre, Kung Fu Hustle, in which Yuen Wooping (Yuan Heping), the legendary action cinema choreographer behind Matrix and Kill Bill, plays the character of a beggar who sells 'fake' manuals that turn out to be real Secret Scriptures for the protagonist, played by Stephen Chow himself. The inside joke for those who recognize Yuen is that the action choreographer is the creator of fantastic martial arts, while the wirework, trampolines, and computer-generated images are the real Secret Scriptures. The joke draws its comedic power from a local knowledge of the genre's tendency to reference textual artifacts. (11)
The secret scripture is a theme that will be most well known to non-specialists in the Western(ised) world as it appears in the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And it was of course around, through and because of this film and subsequent 'similar' arty martial arts films that the genre started to attain or regain a kind of artistic/intellectual 'capital' in these contexts. Wong Kar-wai's recent film The Grandmaster is perhaps at the pinnacle of this 'reclaiming' of the martial arts for 'high culture'.
During the same time period, martial arts literature has been reappraised in China too:
Since the 1990s, the martial arts novel has undergone a significant reversal of fortune in the opinion of Chinese critics and cultural authorities. Doctoral dissertations on the topic mushroomed across Chinese universities; research centers, archives, and international conferences have come into being. The study of the best-selling martial arts novelist, Jin Yong, is now a newly baptized sub-branch of academic studies – 'Jin-ology' (jinxue) – in a manner analogous to hongxue, the dedicated specialization in the study of Hong lou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber), or to Shakespeare Studies in the West. (13)
In the next post, we will engage with Liu's interpretation of the significance of these discursive transformations of the cultural status of martial arts literature and film.
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