“Reaching Beyond the Text: Entertainment in Erpai”

“Reaching Beyond the Text: Entertainment in Erpai”

Speaker: Mr Ewan MACDONALD慕昱安(SOAS): 548934@soas.ac.uk

Erpai 二拍 (Two Slaps) is the collective name for the vernacular short story collections Pai’an jingqi 拍案驚奇 (Slapping the Table in Amazement) and Erke pai’an jingqi 二刻拍案驚奇 (Slapping the Table in Amazement Vol. 2), written by Ling Mengchu 凌濛初 (1580-1644) in 1628 and 1632 respectively. As is evident through the names of the collections, entertainment is a core aim of the stories, and Ling went to great lengths to make the stories as entertaining as possible as he adapted his literary language source materials into the vernacular.

While Ling employs a range of tactics to make the stories more entertaining, this paper focuses on his most sophisticated tactic: reaching beyond the written text to link the stories to a variety of social leisure contexts. There are three aspects to this. Firstly, the persona of the simulated storyteller links the stories to a professional storytelling context. Secondly, the persona of the marginal commentator is used to mimic the atmosphere of an amateur literati storytelling gathering. Finally, the stories’ focus on the “extraordinary” ( qi 奇) and their direct relevance to the issues faced by contemporary literati make them attractive subjects for a reader to retell at storytelling gatherings: the ability of a story to serve as “material for conversation” ( tanzi 談資) was considered a hallmark of entertaining fiction in late Ming times. Ling’s tactic of linking the tales to external social contexts to increase their entertainment value illustrates the way in which the vernacular stories of Erpai were designed to integrate seamlessly into the leisure life of contemporary literati.