The Scholars (Rulin Waishi) / Wu Jingzi

Foreign Languages Press, Peking. 1964. Transl. Yang Hsien-yi & Gladys Yang.
Reprinted by Columbia University Press, New York. 1992. New preface by C.T. Hsia.

The Scholars is a sprawling book, with a hundred or so characters weaving in and out of the narrative, some of whom stay on the scene for extended periods, or who make only one appearance and then return as echoes in the speech of others. This novel is usually characterized as a sendup of the hypocrisy and pretensions of the literati in traditional China, but it is much more than that. As a novelist of manners, Wu is reminiscent of Austen: sympathetic to his flawed and complex protagonists, ruthlessly derisive of those he ridicules, and keenly observant of manners and morals throughout. Here, of course, the moral framework is that of Confucian ritual, and the rectitude, order, and resonance of ritual properly observed is the high point of the novel's supposed climax, where Du Shaoqing (a character made in Wu's own likeness) and a band of local scholars undertake the inauguration of a temple which they have raised funds to build.

The standard interpretation holds that this climax somehow falls short; for all its promise, the scenes that follow wend away from it and do not reach any strong resolution. The rest of the novel is said by CT Hsia (in his preface to the Columbia edition, 1992) to be "a miscellaneous group of stories without apparent design." Such a view, however, seems to be conditioned by the narrative expectations of the modern novel. The book as a whole has a symmetry: just as the scenes before the climax build up the chain of events that lead to the perfect ritual moment, so do the chapters thereafter lead us away from that brief perfection at the temple, back into the messy, contentious world of affairs. And just as Wu, at the beginning of the novel, brings us into the clamor and hypocrisy of the worldly milieu by describing how a young painter, Wang Mian, shies away from it, he ends the novel by withdrawing us into a grove to watch two old men in their eremitic retirement.

If the trip in between seemed messy and sometimes vague, it was precisely because the world itself is messy and vague. Wu, consciously or not, helps this sense of disorientation by the transitions between his chapters, the style of which would not be out of place in a modern movie. After the scene or story of each chapter, Wu focuses on and follows one of the characters as he walks into another scene that plays itself out in the next. This gives the feeling that one is being led, through streets and houses and canals, about a problematic and yet vibrant society, with the author's incisive character sketches as a particularly effective guide, leaving us with as true an impression of both human fallibility and nobility as any we see with our own eyes.