Chinese Storytelling Research Database

Jingyanggang Wu Song da hu
景陽崗武松打虎

Wu Song Fights the Tiger on Jingyang Ridge

Narratortype in this story:
extradiegetic: The narrator belongs to the category of the ‘omniscient’ third person narrator. Through stockphrases of introduction, connection and conclusion the narrator is on the point of taking the position of an overt first person narrator. The pronoun ‘I’ (wo) is not used, but it is the logical subject of this type of stockphrase, i.e. ‘[Let me] tell in this session’ (yan yi hui), section 1, page 1b, c. 1: Let me tell in this session about when the Emperor had his seat in Bianliang All under Heaven was in a constant state of war There is also a simulated ‘dialogue’ with the audience, ‘you’ (ruo), signalized by the stockphrase ‘You may ask ...’ (ruo wen...). Apart from this function of the stock phrases, serving to emphasize the oral situation of the performance and the direct communication between performer and audience, the narrative form does not--like in other genres such as the written novel and orally performed Yangzhou pinghua--directly point to the narrator as the storyteller or performer. We have already in the section about the storyline seen that the drumtale version at certain points hints at happenings that do not strictly belong to the tiger tale, in particular those taking place later, such as the mentioning of Ximen Qing in section 3.1 at a time when this person has not yet entered the universe of the fiction (in the majority of versions of the Wu Song saga, Ximen Qing only turns up after Wu Song has killed the tiger, found his elder brother and left again). This characteristic is given even more emphasis in section 4 when Wu Song who after reading the proclamation about the tiger has fallen asleep at the gateway of the Jingyang Ridge, dreams about his sister-in-law, that woman née Pan. Here he is dreaming about something he cannot possibly know anything about, since his brother’s marriage has taken place during Wu Song’s absence. His dream about Pan Jinlian just at the point where he knows the tiger is a real threat, is one of the most direct implications in my Wu Song material of the connection between his tiger-fighting and his confrontation with the other sex. While such an analysis of the episode is close at hand from a modern psychological point of view, it is usually not particularly stressed in the various versions of the tiger tale. This kind of information indicates that the narrator presupposes a certain ‘common knowledge’ by the narratee of the text (i.e. the audience of a performed version). It is therefore not only the narrator who is of the ‘omniscient’ type, but in the drumtale even the narratee could be characterized as ‘omniscient’ to a certain degree. The high frequency of personal names and place names about which we hear little, but are supposed to be ‘reminded’ in passing, are also markers of this kind of narrator-narretee relationship.
heterodiegetic:
overt:

Jingyanggang Wu Song da hu景陽崗武松打虎

Jingyanggang Wu Song da hu
景陽崗武松打虎