In comparison to romance fiction, the “feminine” genre in popular literature, martial arts fiction, its “masculine” counterpart, has gained increasing scholarly attention in the past few decades. While the material level of production and reception has been stressed in recent studies of late-imperial fiction, martial arts are often associated with visual spectacles of action, speed, and the kinetic body in the existing scholarship. Therefore, Sound Rising from the Paper stands out as a must-read with its innovative acoustic approach.
This book has six main chapters in addition to an introduction and a short coda. In the introductory chapter, Paize Keulemans points out that the acoustic approach in literary studies has been applied mostly to the appreciation of classical poetry. To redress this trend, he focuses on the “acoustic spectacle” (p. 2) in the late-Qing martial arts fiction that offers its readers pleasures of aural consumption. Moreover, since the acoustic spectacle highlights the illusory nature of the literary text, the educated reader's capacity to appreciate this metafictional connection between aurality and textuality reinforces a “highbrow form of sociability” (p. 15).
The first main chapter deals with these highbrow readers' appreciation of the art of storytelling. In particular, Keulemans makes case studies of two Jiangnan literati, the late-Ming scholar Jin Shengtan (1608–61) and the late-Qing Yu Yue (1821–1907). Despite their common interest in the intricate entanglements of storytelling and the printed text, Jin prioritizes the written text over oral performance to distinguish literati readers from “lowly audience” (p. 51), while Yu emphasizes more on the orality to imagine a restored literati community after the Taiping Rebellion (1851–64). Chapter 2 then turns to the booming publishing industry in nineteenth-century Beijing as a result of the importation of Western printing techniques and, more importantly, a reinvented storytelling tradition.
The next three chapters offer in-depth analyses of the acoustic techniques used in late-Qing martial arts fiction. Chapter 3 examines how the sounds of marketplace are represented in the nineteenth-century popular texts to highlight the aesthetics of renao (lively). Chapter 4 studies onomatopoeia in the martial arts fiction, mainly The Three Knights series. Keulemans shows that the abundant use of onomatopoeia, often as cliff-hangers, creates a lively (renao) reading experience and boosts the sale of the printed text. Chapter 5 deals with the cosmopolitan storyteller's art of mimicking different dialects. The transcription of such dialect mimicry in the printed text helps readers to imagine a hierarchical imperial order suggested by the fictional mediation of linguistic distinctions.
The last main chapter focuses on Wen Kang's Tale of Romance and Heroism (first published in 1878) to examine the ways in which sounds mediate the interaction between the scholarly and the vulgar spaces at the lively urban center, which resonates with some main themes in chapters 2 and 5: the acoustic heteroglossia constructs a cosmopolitan Beijing in which a local audience, mostly Manchu bannermen, is created through their appreciation of the communal entertainment form of storytelling. Finally, the short yet important coda briefly discusses the continuation of the acoustic imagination in modern and contemporary Chinese literature. However, Mao-era literature is completely absent in this section, which begs the question: is there any lingering trace of the acoustic art of storytelling in Zhao Shuli's and Liu Shaotang's rural fiction or in the reinvented revolutionary version of the martial arts tales, such as the adventure/espionage novel Tracks in the Snowy Forest?
With his solid research and nuanced reading of nineteenth-century martial arts fiction, Keulemans has pushed David Wang's notion of “repressed modernities” a step further to integrate thematic, linguistic, performative, and material aspects in the late-Qing vernacular novel. Keulemans also tackles thorny issues, such as how to transcribe different accents in the printed text, how to translate Chinese dialects into English, and how to translate onomatopoeia. All these critical and technical explorations point to an acoustic mode of reading, which challenges the deep-rooted stereotype about Chinese characters as visual symbols lacking auditory capacities.
Along this line, it would be nice to see a more elaborate discussion on the importance of hearing in the sensory cosmos of Chinese epistemology, which could be put to a more productive use in mapping out the meeting point of the aural, the textual, and the authoritative: not only does the idea of xiaoshuo (fiction) originate from “wayward gossips,” according to Ban Gu, but more importantly, even the character sheng for the sage takes the ear radical. Additionally, more careful editing should have eliminated some obvious errors in Chinese names.
Despite these minor quibbles, Sound Rising from the Paper is a superb study, grounded in Keulemans's skillful examination of a wide array of primary and secondary sources in different languages, dialects, and editions. As the first English-language scholarly work with an exclusive focus on the sound in late-Qing martial arts tales, Keulemans's book breaks new ground and makes significant contributions to the field. It will interest scholars and students in literary studies, performance studies, sound studies, and transmedia studies.
