ELLEN B. WIDMER AND DAVID DER-WEI WANG
As Patrick Hanan wrote in an article of 1971, “Quelling the Demons’ Revolt is the most neglected of the early Chinese novels.”1 He attributes this neglect to the relative inaccessibility of the twenty-chapter version, as opposed to the forty-chapter version edited by Feng Menglong. The repetitions and non sequiturs that Feng sought to correct are actually part of what makes the original precious, for it is an unvarnished example of the Chinese novel as the form was getting under way. Embedded in the text is material drawn from short stories, but the closest cousin of all is the great Ming novel Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan). Whereas Water Margin was groomed by intellectuals, Quelling the Demons’ Revolt (Pingyao zhuan) appears to be closer to the original story cycle as delivered by oral storytellers.
The end point of Quelling the Demons’ Revolt is a revolt by Wang Ze. This revolt took place in 1047, but the novel is much more interesting at the beginning, where it is at its least historically accurate. The exploits of heroine Eterna are described with humor and compassion, qualities that must have been common to the best oral storytelling of the mid-Ming. To readers who think of the early Chinese novel as misogynist, the depiction of Eterna will come as a surprise. Although she eventually turns out to be a “demon,” she is not exactly that at the beginning. One has sympathy for the childlessness of her parents until her birth, the poverty of her family that she helps to alleviate, and the system of arranged marriages that paired her with a grossly inadequate husband. Issues of poverty and alienation drive the characters of Water Margin, too, and in fact there are several types of episode that the two novels share. The issue of the lively woman paired with an inadequate husband lies at the heart of another great novel of a little later, The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei). Since we do not know who wrote Quelling the Demons’ Revolt and when it was written (the same is true of Water Margin and Plum), we cannot be sure which novels influenced which or whether, instead of influence at the level of the completed novel, there was only shared inheritance from oral storytelling. Whatever the case, the patterns of mutual interconnection seem quite clear.
Quelling the Demons’ Revolt also deserves attention because of its unique relationship with shenmo xiaoshuo (fiction about gods and demons), a popular genre of late-imperial Chinese fiction. While the best-known works of this genre, such as Xiyouji (Journey to the West), feature fantastic adventures and supernatural marvels, Quelling the Demons’ Revolt points to a different style. It is characterized by a degeneration of fantastic motivations to the human and subhuman levels, whether it be in plotting, setting, or characterization, and by a distinct penchant for black humor oriented to human foibles. The author appears less interested in generating an autonomous world of the supernatural than evoking the macabre and funny parallels between the other world and this one. Human vanities and fixations, as well as social injustice and corruption, are examined through the prism of grotesquery to induce sardonic laugher.
As such, Quelling the Demons’ Revolt anticipates a series of comic novellas about the ghostly and the grotesque from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, such as Zhangui zhuan (A Tale of Devil Killing, 1688), Pinggui zhuan (A Tale of Quelling Devils, 1785?), and Hedian (What Sort of Book Is This?, ca. 1820). These works drift somewhere between social satire and supernatural fantasy. The way they conjure up a nonhuman world with all-too-human motifs paves the way for the rise of late-Qing exposé fiction, which likens social evils to monsters, specters, fox sprits, and demons.
The finale of Quelling the Demons’ Revolt suggests the return of a moral order. But such an ending has an ambiguous overtone. Since the demonic characters are condemned souls at the outset, they are supposedly not subject to, or worthy of, the constraint of human laws. The moralist vein of the novella is thus undercut by its thesis, which recognizes the vulnerability of any human pursuit of order in a world haunted by demonic forces but also beset by corruption. In other words, the final return of law and order is subverted by the novella’s pretext holding that the world of demons and ghosts lacks the agency needed for moral rejuvenation, even though some of what the demons and ghosts react to is true injustice. Next to the façade of imperial rule, the threats of revolt and otherworldly subversion always loom.
Patrick Hanan did not enter the field of Chinese studies as a translator. It was only after many years of teaching the history of the vernacular Chinese novel at Stanford and at Harvard that he embarked on his first translation, of Li Yu’s Carnal Prayer Mat (Rou putuan) in 1990. That translation has been appreciated for many reasons, especially its humor, which is said to capture the spirit of the original. In Quelling the Demons’ Revolt we have another example of a humorous original matched by a spirited translation. Readers will appreciate the work for the insights it provides into the early novel, but the humor may be what they most enjoy.
Bringing this translation into print has been a cooperative enterprise. Before Patrick Hanan died, in April 2014, the manuscript had been passed to his son Guy, who died three months later, not long before the death of Anneliese Hanan, Patrick’s wife and Guy’s mother. The devoted efforts of Guy’s wife, Iris, led to its eventual retrieval from a computer, then our colleague Professor Mingwei Song brought the retrieved version into intelligible form. About a year later, granddaughters Elizabeth and Joanna Hanan signed the contract for the book version. Jennifer Crewe at Columbia University Press has expertly guided the transition from manuscript to book, with Jonathan Fiedler as her able assistant. We are grateful to the whole Hanan family and to Columbia University Press for the roles they have played in realizing Patrick Hanan’s hope that this, his final translation, would reach printed form. We are happy to see Hanan’s legacy carried on through the posthumous publication of a great late-imperial novella. Our collective effort salutes an outstanding scholar, translator, and teacher, as well as the novel Pingyao zhuan.