by Steven Moore
The novel’s freshest faces belong to several remarkable women—or girls really, since most of them are introduced at the age of 14; that is, at the peak of perfection per Muslim standards of the day. A lute-playing slave girl teaches Naushervan’s father a lesson in self-determination at the beginning of the novel, and Naushervan’s daughter Mehr-Nigar falls in love at first sight with Hamza (bathing naked in a nearby river); she reluctantly provides a Penelope-like model of constancy after Hamza agrees to marry her but not before he returns from Qaf. There he falls under the Circean spell of Aasman Peri, a fiery-tempered girl who always dresses in red. At first Hamza declines her marriage proposal because of his engagement to Mehr-Nigar, but after he is assured that what happens in Qaf stays in Qaf, he reluctantly marries her. (Thereafter, she foils his repeated attempts to return to the real world and even tries to kill him.) Hamza is rescued from his Qaffy wife by another supernatural woman, marries several more women in later years, and will eventually be killed by a woman—the last in a series of conflicted relationships with women that parallels his conflicts with infidels. Further gender complications ensue from many instances where men disguise themselves as women and vice versa, not to mention a creature called the nim-tan: the male resembles the right half of a human being, the female the left half, and when joined together he/she/they can run like the wind.
Unfortunately, The Adventures of Amir Hamza isn’t nearly as interesting and inventive as similar Eastern adventure novels, like the medieval Arabic Adventures of Sayf ben Dhi Yazan or the Persian Firuz Shahnama of Sheik Bighami (1483). Like Hamza, the novel gets bogged down in Qaf about halfway through and never quite recovers; the last quarter is especially repetitious and boring, and the whole thing contains too many contradictions, inconsistencies, plot holes, and anachronisms to be considered great literature—no doubt the result of too many cooks spoiling the broth. In addition, there are way too many interventions by supernatural figures, conveniently rescuing our heroes from sticky situations, and Hamza’s near-invincibility robs his struggles of any dramatic tension. Even his death is robbed of nobility when we are told that Allah deliberately allowed him to be killed simply because Muhammad forgot to add “God willing” after boasting “My uncle Hamza is capable of routing these armies all by himself” (903). Killed by his god on a technicality.
What delights us most is not the work so much as its narrators’ attitude toward the work, which is infectiously enthusiastic. Many of the chapters begin with high-flown, self-congratulatory remarks like these:
The florid news writers, the sweet-lipped historians, revivers of old tales and renewers of past legends, relate that . . . (3)
The singing reed of the knowers of tales of yore, and the mellifluent quill of claimants to past knowledge thus luxuriously modulate their song, and in a thousand voices delightfully trill their notes to proclaim that . . . (9)
The singers of the pleasure garden of ecstasy and the melodists of the assembly of discourse thus create a rollicking rumpus by playing the dulcimer of delightful verbiage and the lute of enchanting story . . . (53)
The divers of the ocean of historiography and the excavators of the sea of ancient tales bring up the pearls of legends, and thus display them by stringing them into prose . . . (220)
The imagery always anticipates the contents of particular chapters; the last one quoted above, for example, introduces an ocean voyage and a storm at sea. The one in which Hamza prepares to ride off to India opens: “The steed of all riders of the arena of narrative, that charger of horse breakers of the field of ancient legends, thus springs with ardor and gallops through the expanse of the page, revealing that . . . (199).” Just before Hamza enters the arena for hand-to-hand combat, the narrators likewise prepare for battle: “The might of the reed is tested by the narrative’s power, and the vigor of the swashbucklers of colorful accounts is now manifested in the arena of the page” (250). Book 4, which consists mostly of martial adventures, appropriately opens thus: “The warriors of the field of fables and the soldiers of the domain of legends thus gallop on the steeds of pens across the arena of the page to reveal that . . . (697).
These fanciful incipits—some added by Bilgrami, but others preserved from the older Persian versions—give the sense that the authors feel they are engaged in a narrative adventure just as challenging and glorious as Hamza’s, if not more so; his exploits are imaginary, but their efforts to compose this huge book were real. “It was a spectacle of enchantment, and painstaking labor was taken to fashion it,” the narrators say of a palace in Qaf (405), likewise describing their own palatial novel. When Hamza is confronted with a tilism (an enchanted illusion) created by a magician, we are to understand that the narrators are the true magicians, and that the novel itself is a tilism. Throughout the narrative, there are self-conscious expressions of its artistry, its communal creation over the centuries, and even of its superiority to the “real” world. The narrators include many conventional acknowledgments of Allah as “the Insuperable Artist” (10), but often this is slyly followed a few pages later by something—an extravagantly crafted throne, say—that is described as “a work of art to rival the Incomparable God’s Creation itself” (14). Flirting with impiety, flushed with pride in their creativity, the narrators enjoy knowing they have created a world more colorful and appealing than Allah’s. “My world’s better than your world,” as the singer of a one-hit wonder in the 1960s boasted.122
But the story doesn’t end there. A decade after the popular Lakhnavi/Bilgrami edition appeared, a publisher named Naval Kishar decided to bring out a complete, unabridged version of the 800-years-in-the-making communal novel. He had the best Hamza storytellers (a class known for its use of performance-enhancing opium) come to his printing house and recite the portions they specialized in to scribes, and the result is the longest novel in world literature: his Urdu Dastan-e Amir Hamzah was published between 1883 and 1917 in 46 volumes averaging 900 pages each—in other words, a novel more than 41,000 pages long! One scholar who has read the whole thing, Urdu critic Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (perhaps the only person to do so), says it is infinitely more impressive than the puny 900-page version, displaying
a much larger vocabulary of both Persian and indigenous words, many of them technical; an unimaginably more sumptuous verbal texture, with far more elaborate and prolonged wordplay, and more detailed and colorful descriptions; far more colorful and resonant names; a faster movement of events, and a larger, more complex variety of incidents, outcomes, and whole subplots; a tone much more amoral; a more erotic, less scatological interest in the body; much more humor; frequent use of long letters; a greater development of the concepts of kingship and sāhib qirānī [Hamza’s astrological destiny]; a new notion of rivalry between the “right-handers” and the “left-handers,” champions who sit on either side of Hamzah’s throne. . . . much less reliance on Devs and Parīs, and much more inventiveness in the kinds of characters who appear: for example, human magicians who aspire to replace God, and who have magic artifacts such as submarines, flying spheres, etc.; immensely powerful but almost subhuman creatures called dīvānahs, “madmen”; a category of qazzāqs, “robbers,” who are occasionally led by members of Hamzah’s own family. . . . [in sum, an] astonishing treasure house of romance, which at its best contains some of the finest narrative prose ever written in Urdu.123
This Taj Mahal of fiction leaves me speechless.
Notes
1 In modern pinyin Chinese (which I use as often as possible), q is pronounced ch; other pinyin consonants to remember are c=ts, x=sh, z=tz, and zh=j. Henceforth, P and W-G will be used to distinguish between pinyin and older Wade-Giles spellings.
2 The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China, xii.
3 See Wang’s Ming Erotic Novellas for earlier examples of the genre. He dates this novel “around 1597” (98), but other scholars place it a decade later.
4 Page 38 in Hu’s translation (hereafter cited by page); cf. The Plum in the Golden Vase 1:83 (c
hap. 4).
5 For a fuller description, see Van Gulik’s Sexual Life in Ancient China (316–17). Van Gulik discusses another erotic novel written around this time, luridly intriguing, entitled Chu-lin yeh-shih (The Bamboo Garden), which dramatizes “sexual vampirism” (314–16).
6 Recently translated into English by Lois Fusek (U Hawaii P, 2010).
7 As Patrick Hanan demonstrates in “The Composition of the P‘ing yao chuan,” Feng’s version is very derivative, borrowing plot elements from a wide range of earlier Chinese novels and stories.
8 Chap. 7 in Sturman’s translation, hereafter cited by chapter.
9 Page 6 in the Yangs’ definitive translation. Feng’s anthologies include several fictions that approach novella length, but given the plethora of full-length novels written at this time, I’m going to pass over them. For an especially impressive example, see “For One Penny, a Small Grudge Ends in Stark Tragedies,” probably written by a contemporary of Feng’s and included in his third anthology, Stories to Awaken the World (Xingshi hengyan, 1627), no. 34. There’s an alternate English translation in McLaren’s Chinese Femme Fatale (64–101); she quotes with approval Hanan’s opinion that this novella is “the best example of naturalism in late Ming fiction” and is “reminiscent of Zola” (58).
10 Pp. xxi–xxii in Philip Clart’s introduction (ideographs eliminated); the novel will be cited by chapter. Dr. Clart graciously shared with me his unpublished translation of the earlier Story of Immortal Han; it’s a first-person account that reads more like an official deposition than a novel.
11 At the end of chapter 8, Xiangzi hallucinates that Lü offers him White Peony for some sexual yoga, and there’s steamy talk about his jade stalk, her flowery pond, and copulation as “a conduit of pneuma.” The eager disciple should seek out Douglas Wile’s translation Art of the Bedchamber: The Chinese Sexual Yoga Classics, Including Women’s Solo Meditation Texts (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).
12 The quotation is from page 51 of Yenna Wu’s Ameliorative Satire and the Seventeenth-Century Chinese Novel, which devotes a few pages to this postmodern-sounding work.
13 “Traditional Vernacular Novels,” 661. Berg adds: “Not much is known about Fang Ju-hao [W–G], except that he wrote another long novel in 1635, the hundred-chapter Tung-yu chi, also called Tung-tu chi (Journey to the East)” (661).
14 The novel has not been translated into English, so I’m relying on Hegel’s description in The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China, 84–103, 106–11.
15 Again, this has not been translated so I’m basing my remarks on Hegel (112–39).
16 Translated by McMahon in his Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists, 75. Since the entire novel has not been translated, my description is based on McMahon (75–81) and Wu (51–54).
17 In chapter 1 of Shuen-fu Lin and Larry Schulz’s fluent translation (cited hereafter by chapter), Monkey advices Pigsy, “Don’t have upside-down dreams,” and in the Q & A preface Tung supplied for his novel, he states, “Dream thoughts are upside-down.” (The translators place this preface in back as an appendix.)
18 Some of this is lost in the current English translation, which Hegel notes isn’t as literal as it could be (294 n13).
19 “I was intimidated by the weight of his rod and ran inside the cave, tightly shutting the door. I didn’t know where or how he got through, but he managed to crawl into my stomach and almost took my life” (chap. 60 in Yu’s translation).
20 These remarks appear in the first edition of the translation (1978) but were dropped without explanation in the revised edition of 2000. It was around this time (the 1640s) that annotated editions of the Ming fiction masterpieces began appearing; such editions of the ancient classics had been around since the Tang Dynasty, but annotating “modern” fiction was a novelty and hastened the recognition of the novel as a serious art form. See Rolston’s Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary on this important development; he treats Tung’s “auto-commentary” on pp. 276–78.
21 The novel’s self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and foregrounding of narrative devices are explored at length in Kao’s “A Tower of Myriad Mirrors” (written in 1978 but not published, due to nightmarish delays, until 1989).
22 Chapter 1 in Patrick Hanan’s translation, hereafter cited by chapter. For a zany film adaptation, see Sex and Zen (1991).
23 Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu, 55—a splendid study of this fascinating writer.
24 The otherwise careful author stumbles here by stating his story takes place late in the Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368) yet introduces this and other Ming Dynasty novels into the narrative.
25 In addition to this novel, Li Yu wrote numerous plays, essays, and three collections of stories; abridged versions of the latter have been translated by Hanan as Silent Operas and A Tower for the Summer Heat.
26 Chap. 6 in Bedford-Jones’s 1926 translation, made from a French translation of the Chinese published a year earlier. His title, The Breeze in the Moonlight, is an alternative (Feng yue zhuan) meaning “a romantic tale.”
27 But if interested, see pp. 666–68 of Berg’s “Traditional Vernacular Novels” for summaries of 10 others, and Hessnay’s “Beautiful, Talented, and Brave” for a historical overview of the genre.
28 Consequently I’ve relied on Eve Nyren’s translation of chapters 1–20 (cited by chapter), and thereafter on the 50–page plot summary in Yenna Wu’s monograph on the novel (303–55). There is also a translation of chapters 68–69 by Glen Dudbridge available (see bibliography).
29 “After the Fall,” 564.
30 Preface to “Marriage as Retribution,” 42–43, selected translations of the novel’s first 20 chapters.
31 Quoted in Kuhn’s introduction to Flower Shadows, 16 (hereafter cited by page number).
32 There is also a “stone virgin” (shinü) in The Jealous Wife. Ding explains: “This abnormal phenomenon usually occurs in innocent virgins, who have lived over-sheltered lives and whose parents have never given them any explanation of conjugal intimacy. These naïve young things go through life with their senses unawakened, their passions dormant” (342). Unsurprisingly, many of these snow cones became nuns.
33 From chap. 4 of Xu Jing Ping Mei, as translated by Siao-chen Hu in her essay “In the Name of Correctness,” in Huang’s Snakes’ Legs, 83. Hu notes that Ding took this and other notions from a wildly popular religious tract entitled Taishang ganying pian (The Supreme Tractate of Actions and Retributions).
34 For a titillating overview—and for another reminder of how far ahead of European novelists the Chinese were in sexual realism—see “The Erotic Scholar–Beauty Romance,” chap. 6 of McMahon’s Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists.
35 Gang Gary Xu, “Ethics of Form: Qing and Narrative Excess in Guwangyan,” in Wang and Wei, 253; see also Wu, 290–91, and Huang’s Desire and Fictional Narrative, 251–70.
36 It’s available in a fine translation by the eminent sinologist Robert van Gulik, who went on to write numerous Judge Dee mysteries of his own. In his introduction, van Gulik notes most Chinese ’tec novels give away the criminal and motive at the beginning so that the reader can concentrate on the magistrate’s detection work; Celebrated Cases anticipated the Western model in which the reader is kept in suspense.
37 Judge Dee reappears in China’s first martial arts novel, Green Peony (1800); see Wan’s recent book on it and on the rise of the popular Chinese novel in general.
38 Chap. 17 in the Yangs’ translation, hereafter cited by chapter. First published in China in 1957 and several times reprinted in the U.S., their translation is considered accurate and reliable, though “Some minor parts involving puns or unpleasant descriptions (of incidents involving excrement, for example) are left out” (Wong, 153). It contains only a handful of footnotes, way too few for this richly allusive text.
39 Rulin waishi and Cultural Transformation in Late Imperial China, 182—an excellent guide for anyone wanting to explore the novel further.
40 “Lute playing
, go, calligraphy, and painting (ch’in ch’i shu hua) have been traditionally the four noble recreations of a Chinese scholar”—Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel, 241.
41 Scholars have disputed whether an extant chapter 56 belongs to the novel or not. (The Yangs omitted it from their translation.) It consists of an imperial edict, a memorial to the throne, and a list of scholars who fell through the cracks in the examination system who should be awarded a posthumous degree. Similar lists appear in The Water Margin and Journey to the West. See Shang Wei (161–69) for a discussion of the controversy.
42 All of the chapter titles give away plot details. Like most artists, Wu wants the reader to focus not on what happens next, but how it happens—that is, on his artistry.
43 There is an anonymous novel from the early 18th century entitled “The Story of the Female Civil Service Examinations” (Nü kaike zhuan), but it’s a farce: “a young literatus and his friends stage an elaborate examination for their favorite female prostitutes. Through the comic description of this staged ‘examination,’ the author is able to satirize various unfair practices such as cheating in the examinations” (Huang, Literati and Self-Re/Presentation, 195 n36). Girls are allowed to take the exams in Flowers in the Mirror, the last novel discussed in this section.
44 For longer discussions of Wu’s attitudes toward women, religion, and superstition, see Ropp’s Dissent in Early China, chaps. 4 and 5.