Genres of writing in high Tang culture (2)

The Tang Dynasty is seen as the birthgiver of some of China's best poets and statesmen (very often the two cannot be separated in Chinese culture, whereas it's strange these days to see a politician who professes to be a poet). What strikes me as even more important than the proliferation of so many important writers is the expansion of genres that was consciously crafted by collective circles of poets, ministers, historians, and novelists, even though the production of the literature within those genres was, like all historical developments in the world, organic.

Poetry is certainly the most famous of all bodies of Tang writing, and who could blame historians for their nostalgic recollection of poetry during this time? The poets Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu are universally recognized as China's best writers, but credit must also be given to people like Han Yu, Yuan Zhen, and more, who pioneered what Lu Xun argued were the first forms of self-conscious storytelling and prose in China: chuanqi or "transmissions of the remarkable", in other words, romantic fictions or short stories. The aftermath of the Anshi Rebellion marked not only this important development in Chinese literature, but it also led to the culmination of Tang writing: critical essays. In an ironic sense, the full maturation of high Tang intellectual culture could only come to fruition with the terminal, slow death of the dynasty's political glory. In this post I'll skim over almost criminally over the genre of fiction, and in two more following posts I'll discuss poetry and the classical prose essay respectively.

The mode of fiction was not, to be sure, as highly regarded or revered as poetry. Nor were authors setting out to write "fiction" in our modern sense of "there is fiction, and there is non-fiction." Also, although many tales offered certain morals and lessons as per most forms of Confucian-influenced literature, these romantic fictions were disarmingly sympathetic to its characters' experiences and emotions, allowing the fictional world to revolve around their personalities, actions, and happy or unhappy endings. In this sense Tang fiction was far less moralistic than many European pieces in the Elizabethan and Victorian periods.

• A range of lyrical techniques was developed to make otherwise simple plotlines engaging and suspenseful.
• Many of these short stories were once accounts of strange phenomena, and a reworking of the plot or the structure made it into what was a "consciously crafted work" - a story told for its own sake.
• Stories often involved the authors themselves or their associates, who were often officials or imperial examinees. Hence much romantic fiction centered on love affairs with courtesans at brothels. Mark, this also rendered the male protagonists of those stories, amusingly, insipid, weak, and helpless compared to the much more capable personalities of the prostitutes.