The Contemporary English Language Biji, Post- Minford & Tong

Abstract

In 1999 John Minford and Tong Man proposed a model for a contemporary English language biji that possessed the same qualities as the ancient Chinese equivalent in a paper titled ‘Whose Strange Stories? P'u Sung-ling (1640–1715), Herbert Giles (1845–1935), and the Liao-chai chih-yi.’ This paper will examine Minford and Tong's model, and use it to evaluate two texts by Douglas Coupland: Survivor, a creative non-fiction hybrid that appeared in an anthology of new takes on old forms titled Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores: Old Forms, Unearthed, and the book-length work developed from it, Worst. Person. Ever. In the paper accompanying their re-rendering of ‘Miss Lien-hsiang, the Fox-girl’ (as titled in Giles' translation) Minford proposes: ‘This literary vivi-section attempts to recreate some of the features of an unusual reading experience, to build a new environment that approximates the richness of the original’. This paper evaluates that attempt, and examines two other texts against the model established by Minford and Tong.

Keywords:

• biji
• genre
• translation
• experimentation
• fiction
• China

Notes

1. A pantoum is a poem composed in quatrains, the second and fourth lines of each stanza reoccur, slightly altered, in the third and fifth lines of the next stanza, and the first and third lines of the first stanza reappear as the second and final lines of the last stanza; nivola is a nonsense-term coined by Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno to describe the reactionary, modernist and existential plotless stories he wrote in reaction to the prevalence of realism in the early 20^th century; whore dialogue, with origins in the 16^th century, is an early precedent to erotic writing, a saucier Mills & Boon; consuetudinaries are meticulous, exhaustive inventories used to document monastic life.

2. Chapter 34 contains no asides, however, the inclusion of The Cure's set list from a 1993 performance at Finsbury Park (192), appears, at least in regards to content, no different from many of the other pop-cultural intrusions included by Coupland.Chapter 37 likewise contains no asides, however, a conversation between Raymond and Neal about the pat-down methods of Homeland Security staff (214) appears extraneous to the narrative, and, as explained above, would appear better suited to the formatting otherwise employed by Coupland elsewhere for intrusions, rather than as a poorly-concealed exchange of dialogue.There are no asides included in Chapter 48, however, it contains registration and password instructions for a website that is set in different font (285–286) that ruptures the continuity of the main text. Inexplicably, these intrusions are not demarcated in the conventional manner.Chapter 50 is similarly bare of extra-textually demarcated asides, though it is rife with content that could otherwise have been. Examples include a lesson on hermit crabs of the Paguroidea superfamily (295); an overview of Orion's Belt (296); and a brief description of the Coccoloba uvifera, or sea grape (296).