§@ªÌ/Robert L. Chard
Institute for Chinese Studies,Oxford

In addition, those belonging to the martial arts world shared in an oral folklore of tales and anecdotes about remarkable personalities, deeds, and events. Even in the present day, martial arts students exchange stories of this sort, many of which might strain the credulity of those not belonging to the group. Colorful, exaggerated accounts were a part of the wuxia counterculture, and no doubt often circulated through general society as well. The anecdotes about fighters found in collections such as the Yijian zhi ¦i°í§Ó could well have derived from within the martial world itself.

Traditional wuxia fiction, then, though not a true record of actual events, is an important source on the belief system surrounding the Chinese martial tradition, and perhaps also a part or the legend and folklore which helped shape it. This is not to claim that all readers would necessarily have believed everything in the stories. Rather, even the most fantastic elements in them operated according to patterns and conventions well known at the popular level in late imperial China. With careful evaluation, historians should be able to learn much about the extent of militarization in daily life at the grass-roots level, and the legends and folklore which went with it.

But what of the works of Jin Yong? Though obviously not a primary source for research into traditional China, they are a continuation and renewal of a very old literary tradition, one which interacts with and addresses the needs of the contemporary survival of the real wuxia world and the greater public’s perception of that world, even though they are set in the past, not the present. The themes, conventions, and ethos of the wuxia world have always been deeply interlocked with the values of Chinese traditional culture, integral to the “Chineseness¡¨ which Louis Cha himself and others have cited as a reason for the enormous appeal of his work.

To make a perhaps obvious point, the novels of Jin Yong and other writers of the twentieth century wuxia genre stand in sharp contrast to the modern fiction of the May Fourth tradition: the latter sought to break away from traditional China in both style and content, and took a largely negative view of the old society; the former preserves the traditional style and content (though not without modification), and takes a much more positive view of premodern society. Jin Yong’s novels are of course critical of the dark side of the old society and the suffering of the common people, but at the same time offer a solution from within the traditional system in the heroism and chivalry of the wuxia fighters.

The essential “Chineseness¡¨ of Jin Yong’s novels has been mentioned as a serious barrier to their acceptance in the West. Time will tell if this is indeed the case, but my feeling is that it is not. Once the formidable barriers to translation are overcome (John Minford’s translation of Lu Ding ji ³À¹©°O is the best and most ambitious effort to date), there is no reason why his literary skills should not be communicable in Western languages. The “Chineseness,¡¨ properly presented, might turn out to be an asset rather than a barrier. There is a great thirst for knowledge about China among the Western reading public; Jin Yong offers a rich and vivid introduction to the world of the Chinese past, comparing well to the best writers of historical fiction in the West. The added wuxia element should only add to its appeal.

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