HSIAO LI-LING. THE ETERNAL PRESENT OF THE PAST. ILLUSTRATION, THEATER AND READING IN THE WANLI PERIOD, 1573 - 1619. Leiden - Boston: Brill, 2007. XIX, 347 p., ill. (China studies. Vol. 12)*
Hsiao Li-ling, a native of Taiwan, comes from a family of hereditary actors of traditional puppet theater, according to the author's dedication. Having received a serious sinological education in various educational institutions in Taiwan and the UK, she teaches at UNI-
* Xiao Li-ling. The eternal present of the past. Ildustration, theater, and reading in the years under the motto of Wan-li's reign, 1573-1619. Leiden-Boston: Bril, 2007. XIX, 347 p., ill. (Chinese Studies, vol. 12).
University of North Carolina. She published a number of articles about book illustration and theater in China in the XVI-XVIII centuries. The peer-reviewed work is her first monograph, based on a wealth of factual material relating to Chinese illustrated publications and Chinese theater, with the realities of which she is familiar from the inside.
The purpose of the monograph is formulated as a review of various aspects of the "culture of the Wan-li years" - book illustration, painting, theater, literature and philosophy in the context of publications of Chinese drama. Xiao Li-ling rightly believes that Chinese book illustration is studied somewhat one-sidedly: either from the standpoint of purely art criticism, in isolation from the publications that it actually illustrates, or as an object of interest for a literary critic who sees in book illustration only a publishing trick to attract the attention of the readership. Both positions are identified with the works of two venerable scholars with whom the author has a lot of controversy: Clunas C. Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China. L.: Reaktion Books, 1997) and Hegel R. Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)1.
By combining these positions and adding a historical approach, as the title of her book already suggests, she intends to create a comprehensive method for describing and studying illustrations for Chinese drama publications. With historicism, however, there was a certain difficulty. Of course, every author hopes that the reader of his work should be prepared in a certain way. However, this does not exempt the scientist from following some elementary rules, the main one of which is to explain why the study is limited to the stated chronological framework. This is especially important if the chronological framework, as in this book, coincides with the motto of the reign of a particular emperor, because for all cases, except for describing the life and activities of the emperor himself, the motto of government is a pure convention: it is convenient to use it if it is only about politics, but for describing cultural phenomena, a simple reference to the motto is rarely correct.
The Wan-li years are 46 years (1573-1619), the time of the beginning and end of the Ming Dynasty, and are known in the history of Chinese books as the boom period of commercial book publishing. The reasons for such a boom are not given in the book, but they could clarify a lot in the answers to the author's questions. Moreover, the author describes the Wan-li period as a "sudden theatrical renaissance" (p. 25), then as a time of "sudden growth of theatrical illustration" (p.36), then as a "sudden publishing boom" (p. 57). At the same time, it is not clear to what extent the theatrical renaissance is due to the publishing boom, or whether the growth of theatrical illustration directly stems from the increased volume of drama publications. For the historian, the constant use of the word "sudden" is unacceptable in itself, and if he really understands the "suddenness" of certain processes, then he must make an attempt to explain to himself and the reader its causes. From the very beginning of the book, Xiao Li-ling uses the term "Wan-li culture", but there is no clear definition of the features of this culture in the text. It remains unclear why all the phenomena described occurred at this time and how the culture changed with the coming to power of the new emperor.
The main text of the monograph consists of six chapters, which form two parts of the book: the first three pose certain questions, the last three answer them.
In the first chapter ," Towards the contextualization of Woodcut illustration: a Historical method of art criticism", the author formulates the historical approach to the study of book illustration proposed by the author in addition to the previously existing ones, and discusses the question of the types of book illustration. Popular during the Yuan and early Ming periods, the type of solid illustration located in a strip above the text (shang tu, xia wen - "picture on top, text on the bottom") is proposed to be called "mimic". The main format of the Minsk illustration-an etching insert (cha tu) - is recommended to be called "performance illustration". At the same time, it remains unclear what the same illustration format should be called if it is found (and it is found in many) in publications of fiction or scientific literature. Answering the question of why there were pictures in books at all, the author, anticipating his further conclusions, suggests that "readers were not looking for beauty in illustrations, but for information, commentary and moral support" (p.37).
1 For more information about this book, see: Vinogradova T. I. Modern Western literature on the history of Chinese book printing // East (Oriens). 2006. N 6.
The main theme of the second chapter is "Scene or Page: competing concepts of plays in the Wan-li period" - why plays are generally printed for reading, and not for use in a narrow professional circle of actors and playwrights. Xiao Lilii calls on Shakespeare, almost a contemporary of Wan-li, and researchers of his work to help solve this problem: there was a so-called scene-centric criticism, according to which neither Chinese playwrights nor Shakespeare ever wrote plays for reading (p.42). Chinese theater theorists at the end of the Ming were just beginning to realize that drama, according to the laws of literature, can also be intended for reading, like poetry in those genres that exist for public performance, for example, poems for performance at banquets. The play's publication influenced its stage popularity. It is interesting that Minsk playwrights, in their desire to convey their ideas to the public in an undistorted form, sought to control both the publishing process and the production of the play (p.57).
The third chapter - "Illustrations for Performances" - is of the greatest interest, since it uses the experience of the author, who comes from a professional acting environment. Using specific illustrative examples, Xiao Li-ling examines how "illustrations for performances", i.e. pictures from Minsk drama publications, repeat the stage features of performances. Four characteristics of Wan-li period drama illustrations are postulated: the internal organization of space is inspired by the stage decoration; figures are depicted with stylized typically theatrical gestures; characters are oriented relative to the imaginary theater audience; images contain references to the stage decoration and its stands. Unfortunately, the third position - placing characters in front of the intended audience-is not clearly reasoned. (In general, there are few images in world art where the characters are located with their backs to the audience, no matter how such an artist might think of it.) In this chapter, the author formulates the main question that should arise for the reader of the book: why did the publishers of literature for reading allow such a wide representation of works of another genre - illustrations for performances?
The next three chapters - "Performance as interaction with the past", "Image as interaction with the past", "Reading as interaction with the past" - are intended to give an answer to this question, which, based on the title of the book and the author's theoretical reasoning in the first chapter, the reader already has a premonition of. Both the play, the drama as a literary work, and the publication of the drama with all its pictures are conceived as certain spaces that restore and maintain a connection with the historical past of the country in its Confucian understanding. The title of each of the last three chapters parodies, I think not accidentally, the title of the chapters in R. Hegel's book - "a as b", etc. D. Probably, Xiao Li-ling wants to show that R. Hegel, studying the sociology of reading Qing illustrated prose, used purely formal methods of literary and art criticism, while she herself went much further, catching the main essence of the Minsk drama and book illustrations to it: whatever the Minsk playwright wrote about, he wrote about history whatever book the Minsk publisher published, it was a book about history. That's why illustrations are so important in their books. Performance as an interaction with the past. Image as an interaction with the past. Reading as an interaction with the past is not artistic, but moral and edifying.
These conclusions, in fact, are fair and sound, it is only disconcerting that the author, having limited herself to the framework of one period - the Wan-li years, could not or did not want to get out of them, as a result, the declared principle of the historical approach was violated. If Xiao Li-ling were to take even a small digression into the next historical era, during the Qing Dynasty, she would see where the worship of the past that was captured in the Ming drama and the Ming drama illustration ultimately led: to the Qing historical drama and illustrations for its performances in the form of a one-page mass-market engraving - a theatrical folk picture, in which all the features of historicism are expressed much more clearly than in the Minsk theater and Minsk book illustrations. If Xiao Li-ling had been able to break out of the chronological framework in which she had enclosed her research, she would have seen how conventional theatrical language, transferred from the stage to a piece of paper, told the people their story so that the drama illustration could continue to exist outside the published picture book, regardless of it. This would give the" historical method of art criticism " declared by Xiao Li-ling universality, and its conclusions - depth.
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