Wu Song da hu
武松打虎
Wu Song Fights the TigerPerformed by Wang Xiaotang
Narratortype in this story:
extradiegetic: What kind of narrator (in a general sense) is the storyteller-narrator of our story? Basically, I think we may classify the role of this agent with the classical Homeric stance on a level 'above' the story and without participation in the story (Genette's 'extradiegetic' and 'heterodiegetic' type of narrator). In Wang Xiaotang's version of the tale of 'Da hu', the storyteller-narrator tells the story about Wu Song and the tiger from a level superior to that story, and he does not in this capacity play any part in the story.
The voice of the storyteller-narrator is overt in principle, referring a couple of times to itself in the first person as 'I' or 'I, the storyteller'. But the story is not introduced by an open declaration: 'I am going to tell you about this and that ...' On the contrary, the session is initiated in a detached third-person narrative, giving information of the name, origin and whereabouts of the main character, Wu Song.
Only after the story is already well under way, does the storyteller-narrator show his cloven hoof and begin to comment on his own story in the form of narrator's simulated dialogue and personal remarks of an explanatory, justificatory, mocking or moralistic character, a few times even referring to himself in the first person.
The first indication in the text of this more personal mode of communi-cation occurs with the use of the simulated dialogue.
The voice of the storyteller-narrator in the capacity of narrator is directly manifested, interrupting the third-person narrative (summary) or dialogue passage (scene) with exclamations, questions, answers and talkative explanations that all express the attitude of the narrator (which must be distinguished from that of the real storyteller as a historical person). Such passages of comment are of high frequency in the text. Apart from the effect of exposing the narrator's voice, these passages serve many other narrative functions, such as slowing down the progress of action, creating suspense, making jokes, adding remarks of wisdom and morality, etc.
When Wu Song arrives at the Temple of Earth where a proclamation has been put up, the storyteller-narrator once more points to his own role as the person who tells the story, by 'helping' the audience to 'see' what Wu Song saw:
At this moment our hero was standing there and staring, but I had better read it aloud.
Finally, at the first confrontation between Wu Song and the tiger, the storyteller-narrator again surfaces in the first person to introduce the prose-poem praising the majestic air of the tiger:
Under the eyes of Wu Song the tiger looked up at him. At this moment Wu Song felt a little… well, he got a little frightened. In fact I have a few verse lines to praise it: ...
Our storyteller, Wang Xiaotang, not only refers to himself directly: I (wo), but he also draws attention to his name: Wang, flirting a bit with the fact that he belongs to the famous Wang family of the Wang school. By naming himself, a humorous effect is created, because the narrator for a second steps out of his role as the eternal storyteller and points to himself as the individual, Mr Wang. It is a short break of the general epic illusion, an intentional trick of this particular performance.
The other passages where the storyteller-narrator explicitly points to his own presence as narrator all occur in connection with a break in the sequence of events: First at the point where the story is forking between the episode of the quarrel about the silver in the inn and that of Wu Song climbing the tiger mountain. The narrator makes explicit that he is going to make a shift of focus. Next time is in the situation where Wu Song is silently gazing at the proclamation. The narrator uses this pause to 'read aloud' the contents to his audience as a kind of 'aside'. The third time is at the moment of Wu Song's confrontation with the tiger. The narrator takes time to recite a poem and he tells us that he is going to do so.
In the various different versions of the 'Da hu' tale contained in my corpus, it is a common characteristic that first-person references to the narrator may occur, but only infrequently, and in one version there is not a single instance. There is no other example of the storyteller referring to his own name. Even if the Chinese language allows a great deal of ambiguity in the grammatical categories of subject and object, where the use of pronouns is often optional, it does also allow the specification of these categories. Therefore, when it is largely evaded for one kind of subject, i.e. the narrator's I, this unobtrusiveness must be counted as a specific feature of the narrating agent. This modesty, often diffused into a covert narrator type, is of course a general characteristic of many types of narrative. So perhaps one should rather stress the fact that the storyteller-narrator does in this and other instances of our story declare himself openly as the telling voice.
The storyteller-narrator has a high degree of 'omniscience' or power to give 'complete information'. He is able to tell the past, present and future of the characters, to relate their inner thoughts, to follow them wherever they go, etc. Taking the stance of 'non-focalization' or 'zero focalization', also called 'external focalization', the storyteller-narrator is able to describe time and place in every detail, although the event is declared to take place in the year AD 1119. He moves from the inn of Jingyang town seven li to the top of the Jingyang Ridge with ease. He is able to quote long conversations between the characters and also to penetrate their minds, quoting their thoughts in inner monologues, rather than describing their feelings. The wild animals of the mountain are humanized, both in the description of their actions and in the rendering of their thoughts, and the storyteller-narrator moves around with them just as conveniently as with the human dramatis personae.
heterodiegetic:
overt:
Oral Performances