此文节选自林保淳主编的《傲世鬼才一古龙》（台湾学生书局２００６年２月初版）。作者刘奕德，美国康奈尔大学（Cornell University）比较文学系助理教授。本文由柳俊逸于２００７年２月录入并整理上传，热血古龙（http://www.rxgl.net）首发于网络。转载请注明出处与原作者名！谢谢。
Cultural Bodies in Gu Long
刘奕德（Petrus Liu）※
Popular discussions of the differences between Gu Long and Jin Yong usually come down to two central observations: one, those characters in Gu Long’s fictional world do not belong to “schools” or “sects” (menpai); rather, they each have their own martial arts or special powers. The other is that Gu Long’s novels are not set in specific dynasties, as Jin Yong’s texts do, and different critics have interpreted Gu Long’s choice to imply an important understanding of “Chinese history” that must be carefully distinguished from that of Jin Yong’s.① While both of these tow claims are dismissible on empirical grounds, ② it is instructive that Gu Long’s deviation from the orthodoxy－established by Republican (Old School) authors and “perfected” by Jin Yong－ is most vividly registered in the popular imaginary as a question of how zhaoshi
招式 relates to the sense of Chinese history conveyed an imaginary topography of jianghu
江湖. Gu Long’s historic success for himself, we might say, is responsible for his mass appeal and expressive of his principle ideological commitment, which is marked by an ambivalent, rather than univocally “anti-Chinese”, sense of history in my view. Gu Long’s 绝代双骄 is a representative case in point. In the novel, while Gu Long adopts a narrative style that shows him to be an anomaly in his definitions of “sects”, he nevertheless adheres to a formula of zhaoshi as a condensation of Chineseness that was handed down by his mainland literary predecessors. This particular use of zhaoshi allows him to create a discursive space where invisible bodies can be housed as repositories of a cultural ideal of Chineseness. This use of invisible bodies in turn provides, within the confines of the novel, its own internal justification for Gu Long’s unique reading of the dialectic of body and history.
To understand Gu Long’s style as a symbolic struggle to define the relation of body to temporalities over and against a canon of martial arts stories, we need to first consider the centrality of the convention of zhaoshi in the development of twentieth-century Chinese martial arts fiction. It was only after the birth of martial arts fiction as a genre at the beginning of the twentieth century that different styles or stances of wugong began to be identified by fantastic names in fiction.③ While superhuman styles of martial arts were already a conspicuous feature of popular vernacular fiction in Chinese before the twentieth century, their acquisition of proper names in the body of texts that came to be known as “wuxia xiaoshuo” established their categorical differences from earlier fictions that depict physical violence of heroic ideals such as the Ming dynasty Water Margins. ④ It is worth emphasizing, however, that the martial arts of martial arts fiction (as opposed to real martial arts or wushu) refers to an “action” necessarily recorded on an invisible body, one that resists representation in and by language. The use of zhaoshi, figurative names, for martial arts is a rhetorical process of substitution that relieves the authors of the burden of explaining or depicting precisely what their characters actually do when they accomplish marvelous feats. Rather than “spectacular”, as U.S. film critics often assume, the body in martial arts fiction is invisible; referring to a cultural ideal whose textual presence is immediately social. I would suggest that this process of substitution is possible first and only because, historically, martial arts writers succeeded in forging a fantasized relationship between zhaoshi and Classical Chinese literature, so that zhaoshi are always named in or after easily quotable, elegant Classical Chinese phrases. By endowing depictions of “martial arts” the force and qualities of Classical Chinese literary language, modern martial arts novelists re-invent a cultural ideal and redefines a relationship between its reader and the historical conditions of its own emergence. Zhaoshi, then, forms a mediated relationship between reader, text, and context, giving birth to a unique, somewhat paradoxical literary form in Chinese martial arts fiction, for martial arts fiction is then based on something that the text cannot represent. Zhaoshi in Gu Long therefore does not simply refer to “martial arts”, rather, it stands for a set of understandings that readers and writers of martial arts fiction take for granted and hence require no further justification within the space of the novel. It is worth emphasizing that Gu Long, regardless of his political and ideological stances, writes entirely within this framework of marital arts fiction as a genre, which created its historical readership through a binding contract.
Current studies on martial arts fiction in both the U.S. and the Chinese-speaking world tend to ignore the contractual function martial arts fiction as a “genre” relies on for its effects. Critics are erroneous in assuming MAF to be a transhistorical genre and in underestimating the importance of the intertextual dimensions of martial arts stories. Today in U.S. criticism, it is commonly assumed that martial arts film and fiction is fundamentally interested in the body as a visual spectacle, and this assumption is reinforced by the translation of wuxia xiaoshuo as simply “martial arts” fiction, which leaves out the concept of xia altogether. ⑤ Chinese-language criticisms have consistently emphasized the continuity between pre-modern and modern texts, tracing the genealogical history of xia as a motif or instances of literary representation of martial skill (wu). Various critics have therefore identified the origins of modern martial arts fiction variously as late as Qing xisyi novels such as 三侠五义 or, as in James Liu’s study, as early as the 6th century B.C. assassin story 燕子丹. ⑥ Contraty to these positions, I would suggest that modern martial arts fiction relies neither on the performance of a single body nor on a set of recurring but isolatable motifs; rather, martial arts fiction depends for its intelligibility on a historically forged and reproduced contract between reader and writer and the fantasy of martial arts fiction is always nothing than the totality of wuxia itself. As such, martial arts fiction is a unique genre, wrought by highly specific and specifiable conventions, norms, and paradigms of organization. The emergence of zhaoshi as the foundation of a coherent, recognizable genre implies that a new contractual relationship between readers and writers was established at the beginning of the twentieth century. Current views of xia and wu as a ubiquitous motif in all of Chinese literature tend to ignore the fact that modern writers of martial arts fiction wrote their stories in accordance with a newly available idiom, knowledge of each other’s works, and a literary market that mediates between their choice of materials and expected readership. It is for this reason that critics like Fredric Jameson characterize “genre” as an institution or social contract with its own historically determined character.⑦ For Hans Robert Jauss, who insists that that literature is a semiotic act that derives its meaning from and against a historically given horizon of expectations on the part of its readers, the meaning of a literary work is more properly conceived as its capacity to address a set of concerns that are located in its historical readership rather than in the manifest contents of the work itself. To say that premodern adventure stories should be anachronistically designated as “wuxia” avant la letter is to miss the historical lesson that can be extrapolated from the paradigmatic shift in the horizon of expectations that occurred when wu and xia became thought of as one concept.⑧ I would argue that the conjunction of wu and xia signifies a literary means to ground an imaginary ensemble of social relations in an imaginary type of martial arts, which is the actual definition of this genre. The historical meaning of wuxia is therefore neither an accidental combinatory signifier nor tantamount to the sum total of these two characters. It is, rather, to be found in the relationality between those two terms, their historically instituted identity, over and against the specific valence of each term. Zhaoshi, then, is the narrative convention that creates this imaginary social world.
The depiction of this imaginary social world includes an understanding of the social essence of the characters, xia, who constitute this world. This social essence designates some fairly obvious virtues such as protecting the poor and powerless and loyalty to one’s own clan, but also some specific rules only applicable to this literary imagination, such as the prohibition against making a second attempt on another person’s life in the same day, socially acceptable ways of challenging a person of one’s teacher’s generation, the taboo on calling a woman by her name in public, the maximum number of years before an insult or a favor must be returned, and the differentiation between types of rights from master to disciple. Because martial arts authors have consistently prioritized the narrative construction of this social world over the depiction of actual martial arts, it follows that within the stories the learning of martial arts is invariably subordinated to the attainment of the moral ideal of xia, the end to which wu is the means. This hierarchy of importance explains why the immediate precursor of this body of fiction in late imperial China, xiayi xiaoshuo, only uses the word xia in its generic label and not wu.
The instrumentalization of the implied reader as contract
The result of this history of literary development is a prioritization of the construction of wuxia conventions and recurring motifs (such as the social meaning of zhaoshi and the ideal of xia) over individual plots in martial arts narratives. The relation of Gu Long’s text to “plot” is quite unique; his stories read much more like detective novels, built on a logic of information retrieval, disclosure, suspense, dramatic twists than most martial arts novels. As a form of narrative, Gu Long’s martial arts fiction is best analyzed as a communicative process linking an authorial “intent” to a reader, where that reader is understood as an “implied reader”, the sum of cultural knowledge “presupposed” by the text, rather than an actual reader. It is well recognized that, for a story to be narratable, it must have a “plot” (no matter how minimally), which in turn requires a logical relationship between a clear beginning, a middle, and an end within a finite space that is the text itself.⑨ Chinese martial arts fiction, however, appears to be quite exceptional in the density of it intertextuality and lack of boundedness, in that the dynamic of its narrative (what gives each narrative meaning as well as its pleasurable effects, what motivates the reader to turn the pages) lies largely in the cultural space outside of each individual story so that readers of texts in this tradition have an unusual tolerance for structural repetitions. Gu Long’s works are emblematic in this regard, relying much on plot (more than a Jin Yong or a typical novel) than fighting scenes. Martial arts fiction bends most of the rules we know about good fiction — if we open a martial arts novel by Gu Long, we often immediately enter a fighting scene without a proper introduction to the characters or any measure aimed at inducing emotional investment in the main character, and the text that follows builds one such scene upon another at the expense of developing its main plot. This characteristic suggests that martial arts fictions in general and Gu Long in particular derive their readability from a cultural ideal, a construction of Chineseness that zhaoshi enables and uses to overrides our desire for a systematically maintained and developed narrative structure.
Much of western narrative theory is concerned with the distinction between “story” and “discourse”, or what the Russian Formalists term fabula and sjuzhet. Story or fabula refers to “what actually happens” in a narrative, while discourse or sjuzhet is the narrative reporting and ordering of these events. A fundamental premise of western narrative theory is the anteriority of story to discourse — that each text contains a story that exists prior to and independently of any specific order or perspective employed to tellthat story. Discourse is thus said to be constrained and governed by story, since the manner in which an even is reported, as well as its temporal relation to other events in the text, are ultimately explained by the “true” story the text enjoins the reader to reconstruct. The readability of a text then comes to depend on the presumed coherence or logic of its plot, an illusion of a natural progression of events.
Contrary to the assumptions of western narrative theory, Gu Long’s text tends to mobilize something outside of itself or any particular story, namely the genre itself. With zhaoshi, what Gu Long’s martial arts fiction asks ots reader to imagine is not a “story” but a structure of recognition: every time a character performs a special move, someone will identify the name of that zhaoshi and its social meaning, and prior to each narrative, characters apparently all learned to do so in a space outside the story proper called jianghu. Bodies in Gu Long are therefore invisible, for they do not need to serve as a vehicle of fast action as long as the source of martial arts remains an intertextual construction. The convention of zhaoshi thus calls for a careful analysis of this instrumentalization of the chasm between reader’s knowledge and character’s knowledge that in martial arts fiction becomes a triangular relation between culture, story, and discourse.
For narratological analysis, Gu Long’s 绝代双骄 appears to be a striking case that combines an assortment of narrative styles and devices. The trajectory of this text is marked by an unstable relationship between narrator and reader. This heterogeneity distinguishes Gu Long’s style from the ideal from of the novel in western literature, which is often valued for its commitment to a consistent “point of view” or “perspective”. Gu Long’s novel combines elements of unreliable narration (Vol.Ⅱ, 189), free indirect style (Vol. Ⅲ，187), omniscient narrator and limited focalization and shifts almost freely between these narrator positions and devices. At the expense of stylistic homogeneity, Gu Long seeks to control the reader’s knowledge by strategically aligning the reader with certain different characters consciousness at different point, and in this respect he conforms to story. A clear example is found in the scene in which Wan Chunliu asks Little Fish how the latter discovered his own true identity (Vol.Ⅰ, 165). Although Little Fish and Wan Chunliu have lived with each other for fourteen years and Little Fish has been privy to that secret for five years, here Gu Long has his characters engage in a prolonged dialogue precipitated by Wan’s questions no sooner and no later than the very night before Little Fish has to leave The Valley of Evils. This timing is too accidental to be convincing, and the dialogue is too elaborate to be a necessary event in the story. However, for narrative analysis this passage makes perfect sense and is a clean example of what Bakhtin identifies as the bouble-voicedness or dialogism of novelistic discourse: the fact that in each utterance in a novel, the character is simultaneously speaking to another character and to the reader.
Invisible bodies
These selective shifts in focalization form a technique that allows Gu Long to explain his fighting scenes by appealing to “the unknown” or “unobservable”. In so doing, Gu Long ultimately (albeit indirectly) links the inscrutability of superhuman martial arts to the inscrutability of traditional Chinese culture. Zhaoshi as a convetion allows Gu Long to explain the unknown and the unexplainable. Compared to earlier authors, this is obviously a development rather than a constitutive feature of this genre. Whereas texts of earlier authors such as Gu Mingdao still focus much on the actual physical movement of the sword, the fist, or the soaring body, Gu Long relies on the fixity and idiomatic nature of this genre, which has matured by his generation, and reasonably skips the details in a combat scene by simply calling the constellation of physical moves supposedly taking place in front of the reader as a certain zhaoshi. In Gu Mingdao’s story:
少女也道：“老贼！你在黄村做的伤天害理之事，我今天特来找你呀！”还剑迎住。众人都退立一旁，但见他们两道白光，来往盘旋，击刺有声；寒风凛凛，不见人影……忽又听众人欢呼道：“老太太来了！”……那老妇白发盈额，目光炯然，手里拿一根纯钢拐杖，跳过去杀人白光中。少女只觉得自己宝剑削不动老妇的拐杖，而且非常沉重，舞动时如长蛇绕身。（荒江女侠（1928），3）
Consider the following passage in Gu Long:
这一声怒叱出口，峨嵋弟子哪里还忍耐得住，两道剑光如青蛇交剪而来，直刺白衣少女的胸腹。白衣少女缺连瞧也没瞧，直等剑光来到近前，纤手突然轻轻一引，一拨，谁也瞧不出她们用的是什么手法，两柄闪电般刺来的长剑，竟不知怎地拨了回去，左面地剑竟刺在右面一人的肩上，右面的剑却削落了左面一人的发髻，两人心胆皆丧，愣在那里再也抬不起手……神锡道长一掠而出，变色道：“这……这莫非是‘移花接玉’？”(Vol.3, 49)
There are obviously important similarities between these two passages. As wugong can never be fully represented in discourse, both texts metonymically represent martial arts as a movement of the sword, or even its reflections of light. A focused discussion on a ray of light delineates the fantastic nature of wugong and its relation to time and space. Unlike Gu Mingdao, however, Gu Long does not spend much time detailing what his characters actually do in this scene, and marvelous martial arts is first and primarily depicted through its effects (mostly psychological) on the victims rather than its actual execution by a physical body. Here we see the characteristic phrase in Gu Long’s fighting scenes: “竟不知怎地”. Martial art does not require much of an explanation or description in Gu Long, but this nebulouseness is possible only because it is represented as something that is extremely clear to the characters. The characters never fail to identify what move they are witnessing, by being given a name (移花接玉), somehow replaces the need to explain how it works.
Zhaoshi therefore is therefore readerly knowledge, rather than an internal object of the (singular) text’s construction or purpose. A text in this genre is necessarily parasitic rather than creative, and if we understand that the primary object of fantasy for Gu Long’s text is not the “story” itself but rather martial arts as anointer-episodic or even inter-textual construction, we come to a much better understanding of the apparent lack of organization in Gu Long’s text. This point is crucial because zhaoshi connects all the heterogeneous episodes, events and happenings into a coherent genre that we have learned to recognize as wuxia. Here zhaoshi is what animates our desire to read, what shapes our understanding and what moves the narrative forward. In this context, Gu Long’s case is both typical and atypical and deserves a careful analysis. They are really invented for their 奇 or shock effect, as a way or adding flavor to the stories and characters. The usual formula of zhaoshi, however, dictates that whenever a character executes a move, either that character would scream the name of the move he or she performs (e.g. in the Pili series, “鹿马饮泉”, etc.), or more typically the defending character, or sometimes even a third bystander, will immediately identify the move aloud: “咦？独孤九剑！” “小心！吸星大法！” etc. At such points in the narrative, the character is actually speaking to the reader (for the benefits of the reader) by pretending to be speaking to the attacker or himself/herself. Zhaoshi is therefore a way for the text to communicate with the reader and transport the reader to the imaginary world of jianghu. Jin Yong often artificially inserts characters to comment on the names of the moves. We should note that Gu Long differs from Jin Yong and most other martial arts fiction writers in that in Gu Long, zhaoshi usually refers to the special powers of each character as a whole rather than the individual move executed by the character. Whereas 降龙十八掌 in Jin Yong (supposedly) has eighteen different names (亢龙有悔，见龙在田，etc.), in the novel Ba Shudong makes three moves (露了三招) that are collectively called 杀虎三绝手 (Vol.1, 154).
This is so, I’d suggest, because Gu Long is fundamentally more interested in using zhaoshi to delineate the social identity of the person than what actions he or she performs. Gu Long’s primary task is the construction of a “society” of beings rather than individual characters. So even though he does not make much use of “actual” Chinese history, there is nevertheless an inter-personal subjectivity at work that binds him to that history.
This “history” is most palpably felt in Gu Long’s construction of his character’ degree of Chineseness through his depiction of their zhaoshi. We do not find too many explicitly named zhaoshi in Gu Long. Whenever a character uses his or her martial arts, that character invariably propels another character to identify his/her title or epithet rather than the move itself. Zhaoshi in Gu Long are designed primarily to establish characters as recognizable social beings. The displacement of martial power to the possessor of martial power in Gu Long suggests that what appears to be prior to discourse in Gu Long is more than a “story” within the bounded space of the novel, but a mode of interpreting what one sees that is only found in the imaginary world of jianghu. Fittingly, with each zhaoshi we receive a mental map of the social relations between characters and a hierarchy of different types of powers. This shows martial arts fiction to be a highly regulated, densely intertextual literary from that depends on the collective construction of jianghu more than individual plots. Much of the “story” that is assumed to be retroactively worked upon by discourse, in other words, is always already fashioned by other texts and authors.
Gu Long’s zhaoshi are not limited to “martial arts” in the narrower sense. Since the primary purpose of zhaoshi in Gu Long is to enable a process of identification and description, his characters accomplish this goal through a wide range of means that often count as zhaoshi. In the novel, the very first “move” we see is actually the staging of a chicken and a pig. These acts are not “martial arts” in the proper sense of the word (although their mysterious appearance as roadblocks suggests the superhuman abilities of the person behind the scene). But if we think of zhaoshi as a socially symbolic act, as an identitfy-constituting act of self-differentation, as performative naming, we can easily see how, in producing the pig and the chicken, the “Twelve Zodiac Signs” have already “made a martial move” (chu zhao) that by the rules of jianghu demands an answer. Zhaoshi here is the most important narrative device that allows the reader (through a various identification with Jiang Feng) to experience the emotions evoked by the fearful presence of the “Twelve Zodiac Signs”, who have murdered many prior to the moment of their appearance in the text (discourse). In other words, zhaoshi here serves to provide the missing links between discourse and story, but it does so by invoking a known element of Chinese culture — the twelve animals in Chinese cosmology — rather than the description of frightening martial arts.
Likewise, Yue-Nu’s first “move” is not actually martial arts per se: she simply waves a black plum flower with her hand to produce an exclamation: “这六个凶名震动江湖的巨盗，竟似都突然中了魔法，每个人的首、脚、面目，都似已突然被冻结。黑面君嘎声道：‘秀玉谷，移花宫。’” (Vol.Ⅰ, 10). This line provides an additional clue to what kind of function zhaoshi serves in this novel. Rather than seeking to describe “martial arts”, it explains a social relation, and allows for the person who identifies the zhaoshi to insert himself properly vis-à-vis the person who makes the move. Zhaoshi here is crucial for the reader’s mental construction of the imaginary social world that is the primary object of fantasy in this novel (rather than martial arts). Later, we find another passage that further describes this social ability (of recognition): 小鱼儿笑道：“你莫管我是什么人，也莫管我是何来历，你若认为你的武功高，不妨和我比，谁输了谁就做徒弟。”白衣少年冷笑道：“好，我正要瞧瞧你武功是何人传授？”……小鱼儿道：“你真能瞧出我武功是何人传授？”白衣少年冷笑道：“十招之内。”(Vol. Ⅱ, 14-15). This passage certainly mentions martial arts as zhaoshi, (十招之内), but it is not a description of martial arts as much as how this imaginary type of martial arts structures relations between characters in the novel. The whole novel in fact can be read as an elaborate and ceaseless process of (self-)-identification and description, building on a whole set of social relationships defined (and maintained) by names and rumors (tingsshuo) that are assumed to circulate outside of the reader’s knowledge. The structure of recognition that is fantasized through the convention of zhaoshi thus designates a society and set of events/happenings presumed to take place elsewhere or prior to the events that are given, that are only knowable in their effects.
The idea that social identity is legible in one’s martial arts is certainly not Gu Long’s own invention. In Jin Yong’s 射雕英雄传, Huang Rong lures Hong Qigong to with her dishes teach Guo Jing a few moves. Hong Qigong asks Huang Rong and Guo Jing to fight each first so that he will have a sense of what they already know, but when they are done, Hong Qigong says coldly, “Your own father is unsurpassed in the world of martial arts. What trick are you playing on me, asking me to teach you wugong?” (466). But the most famous example is in 倚天屠龙记, when Guo Xiang similarly bets the Shaolin monk he cannot tell which clan belongs to “within ten moves”. But we need to take it as a significant fact that Gu Long differs from Jin Yong in that he uses named zhaoshi extremely sparingly, and the purpose of zhaoshi in Gu Long is not to explain how marvelous martial arts is performed, but why the person who executes such moves is an interesting character.
Zhaoshi is thus said to be revelatory of a person’s inner character, and Gu Long’s text is governed by a presumed logical correspondence between the kind of martial arts a person practices and the kind of moral principle that governs that person’s being. This presumed correspondence establishes a link between the external, visible domain of zhaoshi and the interior psychological essence or “character” of a person, and as such it makes available a narrative strategy for Gu Long that relives him of the burden of developing his characters through concrete plot. In a relatively elaborate combat scene, Gu Long first sets out to describe the movements of Hua Wuque and Yan Nantian, and at a critical juncture Yan Nantian retreats from the combat:
谁知燕南天竟忽然一个转身，退出七尺，厉叱道：“住手！……我虽然从未听见过‘铜先生’这名字，也并不相信世上真有‘铜先生’这人存在，但我却已相信你并未说谎……你若说慌，必定心虚，一个心虚的人，绝对使不出如此刚烈的招式！”（Vol.6,172）
Here Gu Long first makes Hua Wuque’s bodily performance to be expressive of his moral character, and then grants Yan Nantian the ability — as part of his “martial arts” — to decode the deep structure underneath the manifestations of Hua Wuque’s martial arts. This assumption that a person’s inner character is legible in his or her performance of martial arts powerfully naturalizes the teachings of traditional Chinese moral philosophy and, in so doing, re-aligns Gu Long’s text with a mystified notion of being Chinese. In shaping his characters through their zhaoshi, Gu Long borrows from and idealizes a given discourse of Chinese-ness as a cultural ideal. This explains why the “Twelve Zodiac Signs” all happen to be born into bodies and talents corresponding to a concept that already exists in Chinese culture, the twelve animals in Chinese astrology, and why there should be exactly twelve of such individuals rather than ten or fifteen. These ostensibly “coincidental” elements in Gu Long’s narrative should be understood as part of the martial arts novelist’s contribution to the idiom of wuxia fantasy. The case of Gu Long hence shows that zhaoshi is a variable but regulated narrative device that participates in a historically delimited system of signs. To understand the ideological and historical function of zhaoshi, we need to move beyond the analysis of the paraphrasable content of specific stories or images and strive to understand how each text derived its meaning from and against an established idiom of wuxia as a whole, and how that idiom itself assumed its literary and institutional from in a specific context. To do so we need to develop an account of the relationship between the meanings of each text and the literary means by which these meanings became instituted, as well as the historical ground that enabled these formal qualities to produce the meanings they had for speakers of Chinese. Each novel in the wuxia tradition fabricates its own story, but it does so first and foremost by relating itself to an un-totalizable totality of signification that is nothing less than wuxia itself — a deep structure we can only come to discuss if we read Gu Long closely.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
※美国康奈尔大学（Cornell University）比较文学系助理教授
① Certain critics have suggested that Gu Long’s relation to “Chinese history” is what sets him apart from not just Jin Yong but the canon of martial arts fiction from Pingjiang Buxiaosheng to Jin Yong, Kang-fen Chen, for one, reads Gu Long’s stylistic differences from the other writers as indicative of a self-conscious refusal to participate in the construction of an idealized “Greater China”. Instead, Chen makes an cogent argument that this sense of history may be interpreted as an aesthetic strategy to “de-historicize” and “de-sinicize” martial arts fiction in the service of a native Taiwanese identity. Kang-fen Chen, “古龙武侠小说研究” (A study of Gu Long’s martial arts fiction) (M.A. thesis, Tamkang University, 1999)
② In many of Gu Long’s stories, “sects” such as 峨嵋 do make a prominent appearance. Contrary to popular assumptions, many of Jin Yong’s stories are in fact set in mythic rather historical periods. For a critique of Jin Yong’s use of history, see Baochun Lin 林保淳, Jiegou Jin Yong
解构金庸（Deconstructing Jin Yong）(Taipei: Yuanliu, 2000)
③ See Petrus Lin, Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Fiction and the Morphology of Labor (Ph.D. Dissertation, Berkeley 2005), 1-79
④ The first story that was labeled as “wuxia xiaoshuo” appeared in 1915, and the term “wuxia” itself was borrowed from Japanese at the beginning of the twentieth century. See Hongsheng Ye 叶洪生. Ye Hongsheng lun jian－ wuxia xiaoshuo tanyi lu
叶洪生论剑－武侠小说谈艺录 (Ye Hongsheng on the sword－ martial arts fiction and aesthetics), (Taipei: Lianjing, 1994),11-14; Zhengwen Cao 曹正文, Xia wenhua
侠文化 (The culture of xia) (Taipei: Yunlong, 1997), 101-102
⑤
“Martial arts” only translates half of the phrase, the “wu” part, which actually means “military affairs” by itself, although the word can denote “martial arts” in a compound, as in “wushu”. The type of “martial arts” practiced by characters in wuxia fiction, however, is never called wushu, but goes by a fictive name: wugong. Idiomatically, wugong refers to the supernatural powers only found in the world of jianghu, such as the abilities to fly to the rooftop or to paralyze one’s opponents by interfering with their flow of qi. A xia, similarly, is not a martial artist, but an imagined class of human beings in Chinese literary and philosophical texts whose sole purpose of existence is fighting-evil. Sometimes translated as “hero” or “knight-errant”, xia in Chinese does not have the generalizability of the former or the same historical basis as the latter. Hero (yingxiong) and xia are quite different in the Chinese language, since one might call a firefighter or even a politician yingxiong, but never xia.
⑥ See for example, 曹正文，侠文化; and James Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant (London: Routledge, 1967).
⑦
“Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact”. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 106.
⑧ For Jauss, see his “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory”, in New Directions in Literary History, ed. Ralph Cohen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp 11-41. I would suggest further that the specificity of wuxia fantasy can only be explained if we refuse to take martial arts stories as self-contained units of discourse. They are, instead, cultural artifacts that participated in a historically delimited system of signs, which consisted of both literary and non-literary modes of discourse. The goal of martial arts studies should not be the analysis of the paraphrasable content of specific stories or images with subtitles, but how each text derived its meaning from and against an established idiom of wuxia as a whole, and how that idiom itself assumed its literary and institional from in a specific context. To do so we need to develop an account of the relationship between the meanings of each text and the literary means by which these meanings became instituted, as well as the historical grounds that enabled these formal qualities to produce the meanings they had for speakers of Chinese. Each wuxia novel in the wuxia tradition fabricates its own story, but it does so first and foremost by relating itself to an un-totalizable totality of signification that is nothing less than wuxia itself.
⑨ See for example, Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (Cambridge, MA: 1984)
