공안소설 다시 읽기

Rereading Gong'an Fiction : A Comparative Study on Its Cultural Contexts

Surprisingly, Chinese gong'an fiction, even though many literary scholars have simply disregarded the genre as a trivial, vulgar, unsophisticated, and culturally inferior text, has recently been rediscovered, readapted, and revived by our contemporary mass culture. What is the most remarkable here is that this old, hackneyed, and half-forgotten text - that is, gong'an fiction - makes as great an appeal to contemporary popular audiences through new mass media as it did to a wide variety of audiences in the past. How come does this unknown genre, which first emerged from the Southern Song, flourished between the late Ming and the early Qing, and afterwards all of sudden disappeared, successfully reconnect itself with contemporary mass culture? This is partly because gong'an fiction has many affinities with the modern detective story which has been one of the most popular literary genres from the nineteenth century. Most importantly, however, it is due to "cultural dualism" inherent in gong'an fiction. In fact, gong'an fiction emerged as both a popular and ideological text from inhabiting the borders between East and West, between premodern and modern, between elite and popular culture, between oral and literate culture, and between legal and literary tradition. In this article, I try to show that gong'an fiction as a popular text is not only intelligible, simplified, and stereotyped, but also culturally ambiguous, deviant, and even conflicting. In the first part, I try to find out what gong'an fiction is, more precisely, what cultural meanings gong'an fiction reproduces in relation to the contemporary popular culture. In as much as the contemporary reader such as Robert van Gulik attempts to understand gong'an fiction, within the category of the modern detective story and on the basis of its literary formula, he/she often misreads the genre as a structurally inferior text, judging it according to Western norms and subjugating it to Western concerns. In this article, I try to show that gong'an fiction must not be just taken as loosely organized, but rather as intertextual, multivocal, and polyglot. In the second part, I have argued that gong'an fiction must be understood in the broad context of popular culture in late imperial China. In fact, the linear history of gong'an fiction, from the Song oral storytelling to the Yuan zaju drama to the Ming chantefable (cihua) to the Ming-Qing gong'an story collections, does not exist. The genre did not just evolve within the realm of oral and popular culture, but rather it had developed, making various relations with different cultures, traditions, and literatures. The evolution of gong'an fiction illustrates that a popular text indeed constantly attempts to make intercommunications with different cultures. Due to this apparent feature of heteroglossia, a popular text such as gong'an fiction tends to reveal conflicting cultural meanings and repressed different voices, which are often invisible in the dominant culture. A popular text seems to espouse the dominant ideology, but eventually resists it by means of subtle evasion and perversion. Therefore, the "subculturalness" of a popular text, according to Henry Y. H. Zhao, reveals social chaos and ideological contradictions, while a culturally higher text shows a single unity in structure and ideological coherence. Similarly, cultural ambiguities in gong'an fiction, I suggest as a conclusion, should not be considered as cultural limitations, but as "multiple possibilities for open cultural communications."