Translate to Educate: About the Fictional Identity of the Narrator in Late Ming and Early Qing Vernacular Short Story

National audienceA key-feature in the creative strategies of Chinese fiction authors from the Yuan to early-Qing (13th–18th centuries) has long been the transposition of classical Chinese source material into the contemporary vernacular. This process coordinated a subtle mix of translation, quotation, amplification, commentary, and rewriting. It had important, though often overlooked, consequences in the field of narratology, as, through it, authors of fiction transformed to a great extent the identity of who was speaking. Whereas classical (wenyan 文言) texts appeared to be written by literati for literati, vernacular (tongsu 通俗) texts implied a very different narrative contract: one in which literati routinely affected to speak to “common people” (whoever those were), raising the storyteller’s house or village assembly into new institutions for the sharing of knowledge. I believe this linguistic shift is the first reason why the vernacular fiction narrator so commonly appeared under a teacher-like identity, incidentally enhancing the old fictitious persona of the storyteller.This feature was obvious throughout the production of late Ming/early Qing short stories (the huaben 話本 novellas), with their edifying bias. It can be epitomized through the spectacular example of the last chapter of the collection Doupeng xianhua 豆棚閒話 (Casual talks under the bean arbor, 1660s), in which the narrator appears as a village schoolmaster giving a full-fledged philosophy lesson—with concepts transposed from the classical realm into colloquial discourse—to an audience of peasants. If proof were needed of the effectiveness of this strategy, we just have to turn to the first foreign reader and translator of this chapter into a European language, an 18th-century French Jesuit: in the commentary accompanying his own translation into French, he presented this chapter as a pure lecture of Confucian philosophy, and not as a work of fiction! In so doing, not only did he give full credit to the old image of the fiction writer appearing under the guise of a professor, but he himself unconsciously replicated the educational nature of the translating act through his own translation, aimed at a completely different public