Hello, everyone. I'm Jonathan Ho from the English division at Nanyang Technological University Singapore.
On this episode of the University of Oxford Fantasy Literature podcast,
I'll be addressing an intriguing comparison between two authors that has really gained prominence over the past few years.
The central question I'll be addressing is, is Jinyoung China's talking.
Most listeners of this podcast will know of J.R.R. Tolkien, his fiction and his academic work, but far fewer will be familiar with TENIAN.
So before I make a proper introduction to him, I'd like to start by explaining why I'm comparing these two authors in the first place.
And I'd like to take you back to the 31st of October 2018, when the legendary Hong Kong author, Gene Young, passed away.
His passing was reported internationally and in Anglophone media.
The same comparison cropped up again and again, the BBC News headline read Jim Yong The talking of Chinese literature dies at 94,
while the headlines of the Guardian in the U.K. and Newsweek in the US both referred to him as China's Tolkien in quotation marks.
So the reason I'm discussing this comparison is, firstly, because it's been established in mainstream Anglophone media,
and secondly because it's been given short shrift by sinologists, which raises intriguing questions over the nature and validity of the comparison.
My own view, as I'll discuss in this talk and in a forthcoming article,
is that the talking genome comparison has tended to be made on the basis of flawed premises, but is in fact highly appropriate for other reasons.
Examining this comparison will not only help to reframe the discourse,
but it will also illuminate some curious aspects about the role played by reception adaptation
and cultural diffusion within and beyond the poorest boundaries of the fantasy genre.
I'd like to begin by providing a brief introduction to Jim Yong because he's in a fascinating position, on the one hand,
he's a household name throughout the sign of phone world,
both homeland and diasporic communities, as well as throughout much of East and Southeast Asia.
And on the other hand, he's largely unknown in the West, even though he received high civilian honours from the British and French governments,
as well as honorary fellowships at several Oxbridge colleges. In fact,
Jim's relative anonymity in the West is one of the reasons why it's been necessary to have a comparative frame of reference in the form of talking.
Jinyoung was the pen name of Louis Tomlinson, who was born in 1924 in the eastern province of Zhejiang,
in what was then the Republic of China in 1980.
In 1948, at the age of 24, he moved to then British Hong Kong, where he worked as a journalist, editor and translator.
Between 1955 and 1972, almost continuously, she serialised 14 novels and a short story in various Hong Kong newspapers.
For context, by the way, 1955 was the same year that saw the publication of the third volume of talking to Lord of the Rings.
So there was a brief period of chronological overlap between the two authors.
Chas serialised fiction under the pen name Jin Young,
which is simply derived by splitting the last character in his name into the two
characters that formed the immediate and extraordinary popularity of his fiction,
made him an instant cultural icon in Hong Kong, where films and television adaptations were produced almost immediately.
Although in both Taiwan and Mainland China, his work remained banned for differing political reasons until the end of the 1970s.
The lifting of those respective bans saw China's reputation skyrocket further in the sign of world,
and his literary achievements found the favour of Chinese political leaders such as students Yaping and Jiang Zemin.
In fact, Jang apparently made a heavy handed and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to lobby for child to be awarded the Nobel prise in literature.
The official legitimisation of China by such political heavyweights demonstrates just how quickly Jinyoung,
the author, grew into something of a cultural institution. He himself continued to cultivate his own literary status,
most notably by officially revising his 15 stories into a 36 volume set of completed works once in the 1970s and then again in the 2000s.
And his stories have stayed in the public consciousness over the decades, in part thanks to 100+ film and television adaptations.
Louis Cha, also or many other hats in addition to that of an author. He was a media mogul, co-founding and editing Ming Power,
which served as a vessel for much of his serialised fiction and is today still one of Hong Kong's leading Chinese language newspapers.
He was a prolific columnist to writing on a range of topics from film and literary criticism to social issues to politics.
As his status as a civic leader grew,
he played an influential role in the draughting of Hong Kong's mini constitution ahead of the city's return to Chinese rule in 1997.
The relevance and ramifications of that legacy continue to reverberate even today, as you may have seen from recent international headlines.
Chow was also involved in academia in his later years, serving as honorary professor and dean of humanities at his Home University,
Zhejiang University, for five years at the turn of the millennium.
Before reading for a master's and Ph.D. in Oriental history at Cambridge in the 2000s, when he was already an octogenarian.
So although it's although this talk is primarily concerned with Jinyoung the author,
it's impossible to overstate just how multifaceted Young's life and his influence on modern Hong Kong has been.
Jinyoung was a master of the genre called OCR spelled WXYZ, which translates to martial arts chivalry.
You may have heard the genre briefly mentioned in an earlier episode of this podcast by Nelson Landry.
In essence, Russia is a genre of chivalric romance adventure stories involving martial artists, be individuals, houses,
clans or sects living in an historical period of imperial China and operating within a vigilante like community with its own system of moral codes,
social hierarchies and combat based justice coexistence with but independent of contemporary systems of political governance.
Even before Jinyoung, this genre had gained both huge popularity and a status as lowbrow Pulp Fiction, in part due to its escapist qualities.
It's easy to see the appeal of a story wherein virtuous chivalrous characters can help the oppressed overcome feuds,
defeat powerful antagonists and corrupt government officials,
and attain self-sufficiency and supremacy independently of the strictures of ordinary government regulated society.
Structurally and thematically, there are similarities to the chivalric romances of mediaeval Europe,
although the U.S. is descended from a long tradition of Chinese chivalric fiction stretching back a little over 2000 years.
But why is genial venerated head and shoulders above his usual contemporaries and predecessors?
It's true that he was a naturally gifted storyteller, but so in many other ways, the authors.
It's also true that the quality of his plot devices benefited from the strong influence of not just important Chinese texts,
but also major Western authors such as Shakespeare and Alexander demand.
But that in itself wouldn't necessarily have made him wildly popular with China phone readerships.
But in combination with these aspects,
what characterised Jinyan was his comprehensive infusion of numerous aspects of traditional Chinese culture into his story worlds.
As a keen historian, he often place a strong emphasis on historical veracity.
His work also engages extremely closely with classical Chinese literature, philosophy, religion and medicine.
Many of the martial arts that he invented, for instance, are loosely based on lines of classical literature.
His fiction was therefore seen to offer something of a romantically essentialist Chinese identity, and that really resonated with Hong Kong readers,
particularly at a period in history when many aspects of traditional Chinese culture were being torn down on the mainland.
This essentialist identity is also why he became an instant success with diasporic xylophone communities,
as well as with mainland Chinese and Taiwanese readership. After the bands were lifted.
But it makes us work quite culturally esoteric, which is one of the reasons why he's considered such a challenging author to translate effectively.
Incidentally, there have been official English translations of forging new novels so far.
And in fact, the Tolkien genome comparison appears to have arisen from press coverage of the most recent translation.
But as a whole, these translations have been tricky for literary scholars to get into because they vary
quite a bit in terms of translation style and editorial decisions such as abridgement.
And they also lack substantial critical introductions and apparatuses,
which inevitably influences the accessibility of these culturally esoteric texts.
There are actually some admirable fan translations as well. Produced collaboratively on online forums over the course of many years.
But as you'd expect, these also lack support supporting critical materials.
However, there is some excellent English language scholarship out there, which can help to contextualise those translations.
Now that we have a flavour of Jong's life and work, I'd like to turn to the talking Jinyoung comparison.
In some regards, that comparison might seem like an obvious one to make.
Both authors have become household names in their respective spheres and have become virtually synonymous with the genres that they innovated.
This is reflected in book sales, of course, and if you look up Wikipedia's list of bestselling fiction authors, that both pretty high up.
Both of them were either suggested or formally recommended for the Nobel prise in literature.
Talking was nominated by C.S. Lewis. Both Tolkien and Jinyoung also received civilian honours for their phenomenal literary success.
A CBE for Tolkien and an OBE for Jinyoung, amongst others.
Talking is strongly associated with Oxford, where he was a professor for three and a half decades,
while Jinyoung is associated with Cambridge, where he read for a master's and Ph.D. in his 80s.
Just over a decade ago.
In fact, there's a large stone in his college St. John's, inscribed with a couplet that he that he composed about his time there.
But one of the main premises upon which the talking genome comparison is popularly based is the idea that they were both authors of fantasy.
Jinyoung is explicitly associated with fantasy and all of the news reports that I mentioned earlier.
This premise is both problematic and productive, and I'll try to use the rest of this talk to explain why that is.
The genre of fantasy is generally characterised by what Colin Mamluk describes as an irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds,
beings or objects. In other words, fantasy should contain the presence of things which the author considers to be impossible within our real world.
It's this element of impossibility, this unbridgeable ontological distance from some aspect of our reality that cultivates
the sense of wonder that we feel whenever we encounter a fantasy story world.
Tolkien, of course, is widely regarded as the master of the genre, the two works of fiction that he published during his lifetime.
The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings depict a coherent world containing invented races,
cultures and geographies along with magic, which is usually a good marker of impossibility.
However, it's much harder to place Jinyoung under the umbrella of fantasy.
Although some authors do incorporate supernatural beings or objects in their fiction, Genuine never did so.
His fiction contains nothing which unambiguously contravenes the natural laws of the real world, as understood by his readership.
Though I will qualify this later on.
There are no supernatural beings or objects, and there's no magic, although again, this is a point I will qualify later on.
He is simply not regarded as an author of fantasy by psychologists who tend to dismiss or ignore the talk in comparison as a result.
Instead, John's work is strongly aligned with the genre of historical fiction.
Most of his stories have explicit historical settings,
and his deep knowledge of Chinese history is a characteristic which sets him apart from most other Russia authors.
As an example, one of his earlier works, who's a who's official English title, is the equal shooting heroes,
but which is better known nowadays as the Legend of the Condor heroes after an early television adaptation
features a plethora of historical figures from various regional powers at the turn of the 13th century.
The most notable of these historical figures is the famed Mongol warlord Genghis Khan,
who appears prominently along with his sons, close advisers, rivals and so on.
Shimkus is only a supporting character in the novel, but many aspects of the historical personages life are retained and dramatised,
including his rocky rise to power, his relationships with certain advisers,
his decisions regarding his succession, his Westwood's conquest of the charisma and city of Samarkand in modern day Uzbekistan,
and his interest in Daoism and interactions with a specific Taoist monk.
Other novels similarly feature fictionalised versions of major emperors from the Ming and Qing dynasties,
as well as figures from smaller and lesser known kingdoms.
The depth of historical reconstruction in Jinyoung fiction was made possible by his strong grasp of history.
And in this regard, he was influenced not only by the strong historic graphical elements found in much of classical Chinese fiction,
but also by the European tradition of the historical novel.
In several of his essays and interviews, Joe mentioned his great admiration for Walter Scott and Alexander Dumont,
whom he regarded as his literary forebears. Additionally, his own English name was apparently chosen as a nod to Robert Louis Stevenson.
Several of whose works fall under the genre of historical fiction.
It's therefore clear that Geno himself regarded historical fiction and not fantasy as his arena.
And that's a position shared by Sinologists, which is why the talking comparison is generally dismissed or ignored in those circles.
History and fantasy need not be mutually exclusive, of course.
A prominent author of historical fantasy is Guy Garvey, OK, who was the subject of an earlier episode of this podcast by Catherine Olley.
But historical fantasy as a subset of fantasy still requires that irreducible elements of the impossible,
and that's something that can't be convincingly identified in John's work.
I'll come back to the connexion between genius and fantasy later.
But the point I want to make here is that the Tolkien genome comparison has so far mostly been made on misconceived grounds or genre.
This isn't the first time, of course, that talking has been the subject of a slightly strained comparison with another author,
we might perhaps be reminded of the early reviews of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which drew very comparisons to Lewis Carroll's fantasy.
Like the Carol talking comparison, the talking Jinyoung comparison can be productive and illuminating if,
if framed in a certain way on the spectrum of imaginary story worlds,
one author may have been on the fantasy end and the other on the end of historical fiction.
But some of the methods that are used to build those imaginary story worlds are actually very similar.
And what's really interesting from a comparative literature point of view is that those methods
contributed independently to similarly phenomenal success in two disparate literary cultures.
In a nutshell, the two authors were both successful at creating deep, coherent,
immersive story worlds that drew heavily and multifarious on the pre-modern literatures of their respective cultural spheres.
With talking, this process can simply be called mediaevalism,
which refers broadly to the later reception and adaptation of the Middle Ages with Jinyoung, it's slightly more complicated.
China does happen to be a polity to which the Eurocentric term mediaeval can be usefully
applied because it's generally considered to have had a middle period in its history.
But Jim Yong, like Walter Scott, drew on that period to very different extents, from novel to novel.
So for some of his novels, the more general term antiquarian ism might be more appropriate.
Either way, I would suggest that the most salient basis upon which to compare talking and Jinyoung from a literary
perspective is the read depth and complexity of their mediaevalist or antiquarian story worlds.
And I'd like to run through just a few ways in which they built them. It's well known that Tolkien was an expert in Germanic philology,
and that his fiction was heavily influenced by mediaeval and mediaeval, English and Icelandic language and literature.
This influence can be seen from the macro level to the micro level.
There are details as minute as day chronic puns which play on the ancient and modern meanings of specific words.
One simple example from the Lord of the Rings would be the ambiguity of a Macbeth like prophecy,
stating that a certain being cannot be cured by a man, which can refer in the more archaic sense to a human being as in mankind.
Or it can refer to an adult male, which has become the dominant sense.
The fulfilment of that prophecy ends up hinging on the ambiguity of that single word.
But on the macro level of mediaevalist creation, we might think of some of the more fundamental and original elements of the story world.
For instance, the species of giant tree like creatures known as MS.
She's very conceptualisation was founded upon an old English word for giant, which features in a poetic phrase found in several old English poems.
Interestingly, we find a similar range of methods at work in Jinyoung fiction,
again from the micro to the macro level, although not philologist by profession.
He did occasionally engage in wordplay such as di chronic puns on the screen.
I put an example from the demigods and Semi Devils,
a chronological prequel to the Eagle shooting heroes involving a misunderstanding between a well-educated
prince and an uncultured young lady over a word which in classical Chinese was an adjective meaning proper.
But in later, Chinese is a verb, meaning to recoil on the macro level.
One of the most fundamentally original aspects of Genea was martial arts.
It is the martial arts themselves,
and many of the martial arts invented by him derive the names and conceptual inspirations from phrases from classical Chinese literature,
including poetry as an example from early on in the same novel.
The erudite prince I just mentioned stumbles upon a scroll containing the instructions for a set of wonderfully evasive footwork,
which derives its name from a line of a famous poem composed in the early third century.
From these brief examples, it's clear that both authors were not only comfortable playing with historical forms of their respective languages,
but also capable of creating original story road elements, which drew heavy inspiration from pre-modern literatures.
There were many other similarities between the storytelling styles of the two authors as well
stylistic parallels range from techniques such techniques as simple as onomatopoeia words,
which imitate sounds such as bang or crash to more complex constructions, such as interwoven narratives.
They also made notable use of the virtuality of written scripts in establishing the depth of their story worlds.
One of Tolkien's innovations was his incorporation of a runic script based on the old runic alphabets of the Germanic peoples.
While Jinyoung occasionally built plot points around the calligraphic nature of the traditional Chinese writing system.
But something that I've been researching recently and wanted to mention briefly is a curious parallel in literary form,
namely the particular use of cosmodrome, which refers to the mixture of verse and prose.
I'll be publishing some early findings shortly. But in simple terms,
what's remarkable is that Tolkien and Jinyoung seem to have independently developed the same way of incorporating verse with
the effect of stretching the historical depth of their respective story worlds while maintaining their total immersion.
In other words, the way that poetry is interpolated by Tolkien and Jinyoung has a near identical effect on the story world immersion that we,
as readers, feel they appear to have arrived at this use of poetry by drawing independently on separate,
pre-modern traditions of extended cross Metron and John's case the long form classical Chinese novel,
and in Tolkien's case, the Old Norse Icelandic saga tradition.
There's plenty more comparative research to be done on cross-match from in Tolkien and Jinyoung,
but I just wanted to highlight the fact that the similarities between the mediaevalist
or antiquarian impulses of the two authors extend to literary form as well.
It seems clear, then, that the lens of mediaevalist antiquarian ism is a highly illuminating way to approach the talking Jinyoung comparison.
For one thing, it bypasses the question of genre.
You can have two authors who build from many of the same literary impulses but employ a different degree of secondary distance in their story worlds,
resulting in their fiction being classified under different genres.
In the case of talking and Jinyoung, many of this shared military impulses are based on an unusually deep understanding of pre-modern literatures,
which therefore represents a highly significant part of their respective literary heritage and an important foundation for any comparison.
One important footnote is to mention one important footnote to mention sorry,
is that the parallels that I've outlined seem to have arisen independently.
Genomes only known copies of Tolkien's novels were bought for him years after he'd finished serialising his final story.
And so far, I haven't found any evidence that he'd read Tolkien before then.
The phenomenal success that the two authors had in developing story worlds are rare.
Cultural depth is therefore a comparison worth studying further because it has
implications for our understanding of the poetics of historicity and functionality.
Now that I've discussed where I think the the firmest ground for the talking genuine comparison lies, I want to come back to Jinyoung and fantasy.
His work might not fit the criteria for fantasy literature, but there is something about it which lends itself to the association with fantasy.
In fact, even his obituary in The Straits Times, a Singaporean newspaper, referred to him as an author of Martial Arts Fantasy.
In other words, there is something to the curious association between Jinyoung and Fantasy, and I'd like to spend the rest of this talk exploring it.
I mentioned earlier that fantasy is generally characterised by the presence of elements
which invoke a sense of wonder by virtue of the impossibility in our real world.
Within Jinyoung fiction, there is one grey area in that regard.
And it's found in a fundamental aspect of his martial arts fiction, the martial arts themselves.
The more remarkable and elite feats that some of these top martial artists are able to perform the ability to run on water,
for instance, or the ability to shoot projected energy from one's fingers might seem wholly implausible.
But within the context of the epistemological framework of most native sign foreign readers, they are in fact supernormal rather than supernatural.
What I mean by that is that the martial arts, as they are presented in the text of Jin Young's fiction,
are rationalised according to medical concepts and practises, which form part of native reader's understanding of the world.
So even though the physical feats might seem implausible,
they're grounded in traditional medical concepts that a native reader recognises to have widespread acceptance in their society.
The main concept from traditional Chinese medicine, which is central to martial arts,
both to many practitioners in real life and in fiction, is the concept of Chee spelled QE.
She refers to vital energy within the human body, which can be channelled along specific pathways called meridians,
which connect sensitive spots across the body called acupuncture points.
Many schools of Chinese martial arts believe that, and I believe in cultivating and controlling ji,
this in a vital energy in order to enhance physical abilities while fighting.
The concept is deeply embedded in the public consciousness of sign of foreign cultures,
meaning that even those who regard fatalism or traditional Chinese medicine as a pseudoscience have at least heard of it.
In fact, the concept of chai is so ubiquitous that it has even lent its name to the global standard of wireless phone charging,
whose underlying technology was invented in Hong Kong. Now, the concept of, gee,
this vital energy which can be harnessed to enhance physical abilities might sound really mystical to those who aren't familiar with the concept.
It might sound a little like the mystical marines of the Star Wars franchise, which form the biological explanation for the ability to use the force.
But she has actually been a fundamental part of traditional Chinese medical practise for over two millennia.
And the difference in how this concept is understood by different readerships is a huge part of the varying association of genome
with fantasy because it means that martial arts based on cheap will seem more impossible to some readerships than to others.
Some readers, they might seem super normal to others, they might seem superhuman or supernatural.
And there is, in fact, a really interesting essay by the psychologist Mayor Sharp on she and super normality in the martial arts of genius fiction.
I just want to mention quickly here that the discrepancy in different cultures understanding of chy is one
of the reasons why Disney's recent live action Mulan remake got such a negative reception within China.
Its use of Chee as a vaguely defined justification for a range of random magical powers was felt to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept.
What we have in the concept of Gee, then,
is the potential for differences in the conceptualisation of fiction based on differences in epistemological frameworks.
The picture that I've just outlined is greatly exacerbated by the way,
in which the supernormal qualities of the martial arts and Jinyoung works and indeed in the wider onre are reimagined through trans mediation or,
in other words, through popular adaptation in different media films, television shows, comic books, video games and so on.
Out of all of these media forms, television shows have historically been the most prominent vehicle for the adaptation of Jim Jones fiction.
They've been produced far more regularly than films because they increase length is better suited to longer narratives,
and they became a household fixture decades before video games did.
In total, over the past five decades, there have been just over 70 TV adaptations of Jennings novels so far,
and the ways in which these adaptations have changed stylistically can also tell us a great
deal about how and why genome is more heavily associated with fantasy today than ever before.
In the 70s to 90s, TV adaptations of Jin Young were mostly produced in Hong Kong,
and these local adaptations were often both rigorously faithful to the source
material and limited in terms of the special effects they were able to use.
But after the turn of the millennium, the majority of TV adaptations have been produced in Mainland China with enormous budgets,
and these more recent adaptations have taken greater creative liberties with both source material and style.
And one of the key changes in style is the application of increasingly heavy special effects to the depiction of martial arts.
I'd like to give you an example of this.
I'll show you two video clips now, and for those listening to this as audio without video or describe what happens in each clip after I've shown it.
One of the best known martial martial skills in Jinyoung fiction featuring in four
of his novels is the sets of 18 Palme attacks called the 18 Dragon Taming Palms.
Dragons are a symbol of power in Chinese culture. So the name 18 Dragon Taming Palms testifies to the fact that this is a powerful elite skill.
This first clip depicts the execution of the skill in the classic 1983 Hong Kong TV adaptation of the Eagle Shooting Heroes.
In this clip, the protagonist prepares to perform this elite skill, and as he builds up to it,
we are switched to a stylised cut scene in which the protagonist is shown against a black background,
going through the motions of the skull with an overlay dragon to capture its symbolic power.
As the scene, as the cut scene ends, we return to the actual execution of the skill in real time,
and the execution itself is pretty ordinary, with the protagonists palms clashing with his target.
There's nothing supernatural about the way it's performed, and everything special about it is captured within the cut scene.
By contrast, the second clip I'm about to show you is the same martial skill as depicted
in the 2013 mainland Chinese TV adaptation of the Demigods and Semi Devils,
the chronological prequel to the Eagle shooting heroes. Yeah.
In the second clip, the martial arts is performing, the skill is essentially depicted as a flying human missile launcher,
although not as random in its use of Chee as Disney's live action Mulan.
The levitated and destructive abilities in this clip are clearly superhuman,
and they defy the physical laws of our world in ways that the first clip didn't.
These abilities have been extended so far from our reality as to be considered impossible.
And this TV adaptation may therefore rightly be categorised as fantasy.
Indeed, the super normality of the concept of Chee lends itself to supernatural depiction in popular adaptations,
and this sort of transformation of martial arts into hyperbolic superhuman powers
is characteristic of more recent Reacher films and television shows in general,
including the many adaptations of Jin Young's fiction.
It's therefore not surprising that these depictions of physics defying biology flying feats contribute
significantly to the popular Association of Jinyoung with fantasy even within China phone audiences,
especially younger audiences who grew up watching these TV series.
What's fascinating here is that Jinyoung may not have conceived of his stories as fantasy literature or his storyboards as fantasy story worlds.
But like much richer fiction, they've proven to be well-suited to fantastic adaptation.
This sort of fantasy potential reminds us just how important reception is to the genre of fantasy literature.
Concepts can seem more unrealistic when transmitted from one country to another.
And unrealistic qualities can also be amplified by popular adaptations.
The case of Jinyoung Young shows that story walls, which wouldn't originally be classified under fantasy,
can still grow transmedia mediately into the genre.
To return to the question at the heart of this talk, then I think a number of factors have aligned to make the talking Jinyoung comparison viable,
not only in terms of their extraordinary popular success, but also in terms of the literary attributes which generated their success.
In both cases, we have imagined an imaginative story worlds of rare antiquarian depth.
We have parallels in storytelling style and formal similarities in the use of prose mecham.
And we have some sort of connexion to fantasy, which in this case is the result of transmit reality.
I'd like to close with the observation that the toking genome comparison is still very fertile ground for further comparative literary study.
So this podcast episode certainly won't be the last word. Thanks for listening.