Miniver Cheevy

Having acquired a taste for Chinese wuxia martial arts films in the last few years, I was fascinated by David Chute's long essay Heroic Grace, which clarified for me a lot of stuff about how those pictures work. Here's a taste of Chute talking about the mythic world of these stories.

A Chinese saying insists that “the font of all martial arts is Shaolin,” and when the monks of the Shaolin Temple first broke the code of silence and passed on their top-secret fighting techniques to ordinary citizens, it was to arm them against a corrupt imperial regime. The invasion of China by the Manchus in 1644, which established the Qing (Ching) dynasty, inspired a succession of underground anti-imperial movements that for the next three centuries sought to restore indigenous Chinese to the throne.
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Japan's samurai warriors were aristocrats, dutiful officials of a mammoth feudal bureaucracy; the pathos of the scruffy ronin is defined by the lofty social position he has been expelled from or has abandoned. The Chinese martial hero may be a natural aristocrat but he is also a counter-cultural figure. The earliest full-blown xia in Chinese fiction, like those in the 16th century novel The Water Margin, were idealistic Robin Hood-style bandits who holed up in remote locations and staged wrong-righting forays against the status quo. The world these heroes created for themselves has since taken on a life of its own, has become a sort of “shared world” alternate universe in which, the mundane laws of physics are suspended, and men and women of spotless virtue roam the landscape searching for fresh challenges. It is a world that is so well known to all Asian creators and consumers of wuxia stories that it even has a name: jiang hu. In subtitles and dubbed dialogue this key term is often translated as “the martial world" or “the martial arts world.” Its literal meaning is simply “rivers and lakes,” which has implications similar to “the wilderness" or “the frontier:” a remote and under-populated region where groups of outcasts can safely congregate. But in a more important sense the jiang hu was everywhere and nowhere, permeating the straight world at every level, an alternate social structure which its denizens had fashioned in their own image.

The jiang hu described in wuxia novels and depicted in wuxia movies is a lavishly embroidered and glamorized version of this hardscrabble reality, which was a seething symptom of social chaos, this subculture of bandits, beggars, gamblers, and con artists.

Hmmnn. The Old West, the Age of Chivalry, Jiang Hu ... I presume that every civilization has a mythic place and time of heroes.

But ours is now Outer Space, isn't it? Not the mythic past of our here and now, but a mythic future somewhere else. How odd is that?

Labels: storytelling