Pu Songling (1640–1715)

According to the man who wrote P'u's epitaph, on their first meeting, he was expecting someone as brilliant and charming as his stories, only to find an old man who was very precise in his habits and low in his speech, and who found it rather difficult to say what was on his mind. The writer goes afficher plus on to say, however, that, after knowing P'u a while, he came to appreciate the breadth and depth of his knowledge and the boldness and daring of his ideas. In his own preface to his Strange Tales from Make-do Studio, a work that is now considered one of the great achievements of Chinese fantastic narrative, P'u writes in moving terms what that narrative represents to him, the only vent for his feelings in a world where he feels totally alone and surrounded by poverty and contempt, where he is "a bird terrified by the winter frosts and nestling against the tree which can afford him no warmth." And yet, in his miserable little room with its smoky lamp and table "cold as a sheet of ice," he spins marvelous tales and through them vents his indignation against the arrogance of the rich, the subjugation of women, and the plight of the poor peasants, from whom he was distinguished by education but not by condition. Though P'u writes in a classical and highly artificial style, studded with literary allusions, there is something disconcertingly modern about his view of the world, with all its cruelties and carefully chosen and subtly realistic detail, and yet illuminated by an unspoken set of very untraditional principles that shines through the supernatural story lines. In P'u's imaginary world, the ideal woman is not a captive, but a bold and independent actor who, unfettered by convention, is free to love a man as her equal. And, although corruption spreads beyond earthly bounds all the way to the underworld, the God of War himself punishes an evil office seeker after his death, so that justice eventually does prevail. P'u had a hard life and wrote out of his own experience. As the youngest son, he was left with little when family frictions necessitated the division of property, and, having been unsuccessful in the examinations, he was forced to eke out a living as a tutor to various prominent gentry families who treated him as contemptuously as they did their servants. It was only in later years, after his book of tales was completed, that he finally found a comfortable position in a wealthy family who treated him with respect and friendly intimacy. But by that time he was already well into middle age. It is a great testament to the human imagination that a man in such a setting could weave such unusual tales. Unlike many Chinese writers of fiction P'u did not borrow heavily from tradition, but instead made fairy tales out of real life, where, as Jaroslav Prusek, the great Czech Sinologist has written, "the frontiers between the world of man and the world of other creatures of nature disappeared, . . . and he hinted at something mysterious behind every apparently natural and simple phenomenon, and . . . he flooded the whole of life with an air of inexplicable but unlimited possibilities." (Bowker Author Biography) afficher moins