Fallen from favor?
But there are people who wonder why, now that we are marching into the 21st century as an advanced society with rule by law, we still find martial arts novels, with their tales of sweet revenge and their black-and-white morality, so alluring.
"Sweet revenge" is a convention of the martial arts novel. The deed is committed both to exact revenge and to gain pleasure. There seem to be few moral qualms about killing another human being. In taking revenge, the character Wu Song in The Water Margin bloodily killed Chang Bulan and his entire family, young and old alike-some 15 souls altogether.
"Much of the content of martial arts novels is ridiculous and completely illogical. What goes on always far exceeds what could happen in real life. By taking thousands of years of legends about demigods and immortals, and leavening them with the chivalrous spirit of knights errant, these novelists have created a unique fantasy land," wrote one social critic in a newspaper. This critic held that by employing a lot of classical Chinese vocabulary to name the postures in their kungfu move sequences, martial arts novelists are in fact pulling one over on readers who have little understanding of ancient Chinese. They are charming people by being intentionally mystifying. "All writers of martial arts novels are to some degree cynics, and thus when I read these novels there is somewhat the feeling of a clever person pulling the wool over my eyes. When you fall completely in its thrall, it's a little bit like being led by the nose."
"The Chinese have long held the knights errant tradition in particularly high esteem," says Nanfang Shuo, who believes that educated people shouldn't expand the realm for lawlessness by putting the exploits of these kungfu gallants up for unreserved praise. "The world of these kungfu fighters is an escapist realm par excellence for the modern reader." By holding these knights errant in too high esteem, intellectuals may be prevented from moving on.
Yan Jia-yan, a professor of Chinese at Beijing University, begs to differ. Holding that Jin Yong's novels reject the notion of "sweet revenge," he cites how Guo Jing, the hero of The Eagle-Shooting Heroes, having killed Wan Yan-hong and thus getting both revenge for his family and his nation, still has doubts: "As soon as he thought of the word 'revenge,' memories of the Khorasm massacre surged to mind. Although he had taken revenge on his father's murderer, he had also killed many innocent people in the process. How could he live with that? It seemed perhaps that revenge wasn't all it was made out to be." He even began to have doubts about having learned martial arts.
Some people believe that martial arts novels are a lot like Bao Qingtian and Shi Gong, popular television series about magistrates in ancient China that provide a release for people in their dissatisfaction and frustration with modern life.
Highly literary
Apart from giving a more modern feeling to the knights errant tradition, Jin Yong has a very serious attitude about his work, and this is another reason he is king of the field.
Young readers may be unaware that the editions of Jin Yong they purchase now are the final result of many years of revisions. They are quite different from what first appeared in installments in Hong Kong newspapers years ago. In 1972, when Jin Yong finished The Deer and the Cauldron, he stopped writing. In 1979, when the ban against his works in Taiwan was lifted, the rights were first bought by Taipei's Yuanching Publishing Co. and then transferred to Yuanliu, whose editions are those most widely circulated now.
In a paper "The Publishing History of Jin Yung's Novels," Lin Pao-hun notes that after Jin Yung published his 15 novels (totaling nearly 30 million Chinese characters), he began making revisions, which ran the gamut from tiny details and minor stylistic changes to major changes involving plot and characters.
Many scholars believe that Jin Yong's prose style was even more elegant after his revisions. The mainland writer Li Tuo says that Jin Yong's work has "brought Chinese vernacular writing to a new peak."
Plot revisions were even more the focus of Jin Yong's "decade of revisionism." The most famous example is that in the old version of The Deer and the Cauldron the main character Wei Xiaobao was quite the typical kungfu knight errant. Yet after half the installments had been published, Jin Yong decided to get rid of his kungfu. In order to make up for the inconsistencies between the beginning and end, Jin Yong removed many passages and revised others before publishing the work in book form, so that Wei Xiaobao became "the single character in martial arts novels who had no kungfu yet was still able to succeed brilliantly in martial arts society."
Lin holds that in the early period Jin Yong's works also had blemishes and thus it is unfair to compare his works to those of other authors who never revised their novels. But revision is an author's prerogative. Hence, Lin is only more certain that Jin Yong's glory is well deserved, because in the field of martial arts fiction "he was the first writer to take a serious look at his own work."
Literature or history
The literary merits of Jin Yong's work have been widely acknowledged, and quite a few people have suggested that his works be read in secondary school as "writing textbooks." Yet immersed in their historical backgrounds, his novels seem like they could also be used as history texts.
Jin Yong's novels have always been famous for their historical atmosphere. For instance, Tianlong Ba Bu takes place at the beginning of the Northern Song dynasty, when the Han Chinese Song and the Tartars of the Liao dynasty were fighting for territory; Sword of Loyalty describes the last days of the Ming dynasty, when bandits roamed the land and the Manchurians of the Qing dynasty were starting to invade China proper; The Deer and the Cauldron describes the halcyon days of Kangxi's rule in the Qing Dynasty, and Book and Sword, Gratitude and Revenge is about the secret life of the Qing emperor Qianlong. Largely meshing with historical realities, they make readers curious about just what in them is history and what isn't.
Jin Yong has such a strong understanding of history that sometimes readers can't tell if his books are historical novels or martial arts novels. For The Deer and the Cauldron in particular, Jin Yong himself has said himself, "You might as well just go ahead and call it an historical novel."
When Jin Yong meets with his fans, readers often ask him about the likelihood of Chen Jia-luo really being the Qing emperor Yongzheng's son. Some readers have even found the novels help in taking history tests in school. A writter of a letter to the editor in a newspaper recalled one question that asked about how long the Song had held out against the Mongolians in the city of Xiangyang. The writer said that he remembered that in Jin Yong's Shendiao Xialu Guo Jing and Huang Rong were defending Xiangyang before Guo Niang was born and that when Guo Niang was 16 the city hadn't fallen yet, so he guessed 16 years. His teacher took only three points off.
Yitian Tulong Ji discussed Zoroastrianism in China, combining martial arts exploits and true historical events. As a result, what was a little-known religious sect rose to much greater renown thanks to the book's high sales and the high ratings of the television serial. Jin Yong's descriptions of Zoroastrian rules and customs won praise from the mainland historian Chao Huashan as "remarkably accurate."
Yet in Jin Yong's novel, after Zhang Wuji unites the Zoroastrians in China and becomes their high priest in China, "although Zhu Yuanzhang takes a bad turn and engages in many deceptions to become emperor, because the Zoroastrians [known in China as the Ming], helped him to conquer the land, he felt obliged to name his dynasty after them." In regard to this claim that the Ming dynasty was named after the Ming religion, Lin Wushu, a scholar in Taiwan, has weighed the evidence and come to the conclusion that "there is nothing to support the notion; it's taking the word too literally."
With this gap between Jin Yong's novels and historical reality, Lin Fu-shih, an assistant researcher at the Institute of History and Philology at the Academia Sinica, says, "My feelings about Jin Yong are complicated: as a reader I have nothing but respect for him, yet as an historian he makes me feel uneasy." Lin says that in any case Jin Yong certainly has achieved remarkable results in transmitting knowledge of history.
Jin Yong's love of history has won the praises of historians. "Jin Yong himself is willing to be called an historical novelist because historical novels enjoy a higher literary status," holds Lin Pao-hwun, who believes that Jin Yong worries that martial arts novels are regarded as an "inferior form of literature."
Foam on waves
In any case, most scholars feel that Jin Yong's novels' place in history is almost assured.
"There won't be another wave of martial arts novels," says Lin. It has been a long time since there has been an academic conference dealing with them, and now the topic seems fresh, but the fever for them will cool. Lin says pessimistically that we have already entered the "age of literary decline." A parallel can be made to the "Three Kingdoms mania" that has followed in the wake of the mainland television production of Romance of the Three Kingdoms being aired in Taiwan. Everyone now knows the heroes of those kingdoms and the famous knights errant of Jin Yong's novels, but not everyone has read the books, and with each succeeding generation there will be fewer and fewer who have.
Yet some people argue that "it makes no difference if there is anyone to carry on the tradition of martial arts novels or not." Changing times have brought detective novels, horror novels and so forth. If one form of novel dies, there will always be a new form to replace it.
As the great Song dynasty writer Su Dongpo once wrote: "Heroes of history are like the foam on a wave, here but for a moment. Yet every generation has great talents of its own!"