水滸傳的煽動藝術

THE SEDITIOIS ART OF THE WATER MARGIN

孫述宇(Phillip S. Y. Sun)

《中國學人》 5期 (1973/07) Pp. 75-101+ap4-5

https://doi.org/10.30187/CS.197307_(5).0006

並列摘要

In the first section, attention is focused on the unfairness towarrs the fair sex in the book. The writer argues that the hostility reflects neither the inferior position of females in the society, nor any important tradition in Chinese literature, but rather the mentality of some desperate men who had played a significant part in the creation and transmission of the Water Margin stories before they were finally organized into a novel. While the identity of these men cannot be conclusively established, their desperado ethos is plainly seen in the emphasis upon the brotherhood of like-minded men no less than in the mistrust of women. The Water Margin is thus called a ＂non-pastoral＂ outlaw story, a propagandistic work whose success or failure is not to be measured solely by the yard-stick of pure literature. Traces of revision of the stories by those men are also noted. The second section treats the recurrent theme of vengeance in the book. This theme, the writer explains, is a means of effecting sedition. The numerous gory passages in the book, which upon closer scrutiny reveal themselves to be not really sadistic, are the ritualistic spelling out of the fulfilment of poetic justice. He further points out that this theme is responsible for the introduction of a new type of characters as well as for the metamorphosis of the cycle of folk heroic stories into a novel of social dimensions. An appendix to this section is an analysis of the long episode of Tseng-t'ou-shih, which the writer, following the suggestion of Yen Tun-yi, interpretes as a revenge story in a national scale. The third section deals with another aspect of the seditious art of the novel. The main contention is that the idea of manhood is used like a spur to prick the low-class audience into armed action. The idea, it is pointed out, is expressed through the concrete images of wine, meat, and silver, and is accountable for the hedonistic and mercenary flavours that unappreciative contemporary readers find in the Liangshan heroes.