Some Limitations of Chinese Fiction

One wonders what the general reading public has made of the translations of traditional Chinese fiction which have recently appeared in bookstores, in several instances in paper-bound series usually devoted to up-to-date novels of violence and vampires. Chinese colloquial fiction before the coming of Western influences certainly contains enough of both murder and adultery to give the average reader a sense of literary familiarity; but the thoughtful reader must be puzzled by an undefinable inadequacy, by a feeling of literary promise unfulfilled, to which even the student of Chinese stories and novels must confess. Unconsciously conditioned as are we all to the premises and achievements of European fiction, we cannot fail to weigh this fiction of another culture in the same balance and find it vaguely wanting. In the following pages I intend to isolate several of the factors which contribute to our impression of disappointment upon reading those works which have long been a source of delight to the Chinese.