Judge Dee Novels / Robert van Gulik

Don't judge a book by its cover - nor the reviews printed on the blurb. Going by those, this series of detective novels set in Tang China would be a painful read indeed:

• "Judge Dee... is one of those acquired tastes, like the ancient buried Chinese eggs...",


• "His cases are always as lusciously tangled as soft noodles...",


• "I never tire of this ingenious Chinese pastiche cookery...."

The novels themselves, though they may be chinoiserie, are at least sinologically informed chinoiserie. Van Gulik was a Dutch diplomat to the Far East, and an amateur sinologist, writing on such subjects as the Chinese detective novel, erotica and sexual life, and the gibbon as a motif in art. The Judge Dee series began as a diversion and soon became very popular. They are based, however, on a historical personage - Di Renjie, who was a Tang magistrate and later high official, who also served under the Empress Wu Zetian. Stories about his ingenuity and integrity were long in circulation, and served as a basis for a 18th century Qing novel called Di Gong An (The Cases of Judge Dee), which van Gulik translated during the 1940s.

According to van Gulik, Di Gong An was more likely to appeal to modern readers of the genre because in some ways it isn't the typical Chinese detective novel. It is relatively short and doesn't name the culprit at the very beginning. He used the characters of Judge Dee and his lieutenants to write his own series of stories imitating the style of the original, including the cheerful anachronisms typical of later Chinese fiction. The stories, though set in the Tang, are really describing life a thousand years later in the Ming, in the details of the exam system and bureaucracy, in the food that people eat, their modes of transport, and their religious practices. Other favorite literary tropes that van Gulik appropriated include the evil monks who feature prominently in the Chinese Bell Murders, one of the earlier books in the series. Their quality, though, is somewhat uneven. The later ones tend to be shorter and pay less attention to the task of imitating the original style, but despite those minor shortcomings, they are still highly entertaining.

So, is this fan fiction? Does what van Gulik do with Judge Dee compare to what thousands of adolescents do with Edward Cullen and other fictional characters (and sometimes get sued for it)? The Judge Dee novels are certainly fan fiction - they fit all the technical criteria of the genre - but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are campy or somehow inauthentic. That anxiety about authenticity is a strikingly modern phenomenon. Recall that the original Di Gong An itself appropriated names and characters from history and literature. This is not just a characteristic of Chinese literature - even Shakespeare's plays were reworkings of his antecedents. The Judge Dee books show us what the potentials are for fan fiction broadly construed, and are real good reads in themselves.

Dictionary of Modern English Usage / H.W. Fowler

As a reference book on the use of the English language, "Fowler's" is by far the liveliest and most readable. In the long tradition of the English writing about their English, the best have consistently been those who were not timid in their opinion of what was good and what was bad writing; I think of Dr Johnson and Orwell, and of course Fowler.

The Oxford University Press is now reissuing the first edition, which we might want to call the Original of Fowler. The second, as that review notes, was lightly edited by Ernest Gowers, a career civil servant whose own tome, Plain Words is perhaps the British mandarin's equivalent of Strunk and White. The most recent edition of Modern English Usage, however, is a massively inflated book. The original could sit nicely in your hand on the bus. The newer book would prefer a desk. It confirmed what I feared when I leafed through it for the first time: bloodlessness, prevarication, and a particularly academic strain of frustrating equanimity. It is not a book that you would read for pleasure, while the older edition (I own the second) certainly was.

When I was in the army I sometimes read it in barracks on free evenings; once my bunkmate asked if I was reading the Bible - no, I said, I'm reading a dictionary, and got a funny look from him. What made it so riveting, I think, were the idiosyncratic (yet sound) entries and their occasionally oblique headings ("Out of the frying pan..." headed an entry on common errors), and the cross-references from one entertaining miniature essay to another, a strikingly prescient forerunner of serial-Wikipedia-procrastination.

A reactionary might say, in the face of news like the British Local Government Agency issuing a list of jargon and meaningless words for bureaucrats to avoid, that "we need a Fowler now more than ever", and other platitudes of that kind. Maybe so, but far worse than the purely unaesthetic qualities of bad writing, a reliance on cliche and faddish buzzwords has a more sinister aspect. In Hannah Arendt's description of Adolf Eichmann, she noted how he seemed to fix on using certain catchwords or stock phrases that he favored. In our modern world, we might say that he settled into them like how a corporate-type might settle into "synergies" or "paradigms", or how the military likes clunky acronyms that it then repurposes to all parts of speech. Perhaps the banality of evil, then, grows best upon a banality of mind, and the best fertilizer for such minds is a soulless, thoughtless, and unfeeling bureaucratic banality of speech.

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.