Also by J.K. VAN DOVER
* * *
Making the Detective Story American:
Biggers, Van Dine and Hammett and the Turning Point of the Genre, 1925–1930
(McFarland, 2010)
The Judge Dee Novels of R. H. van Gulik
The Case of the Chinese Detective and the American Reader
J.K. Van Dover
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-1741-1
© 2015 J.K. Van Dover. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
On the cover: original artwork for the Judge Dee novel, The Willow Pattern, 1993 acrylic ink on cotton board (8" x 6") © Ed Lindlof, Illustrator
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
For Sarala, again
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: The Historical Dí Rénjié (Judge Di)
One. Judge Dee and the Two Traditions of the Detective Story
Two. The Judge Dee Novels
Three. From Heathen Chinee to Magistrate Dee: China and the Chinese in American Literature, 1880–1972
Appendices:
1: The Six Ages of American Relations with China
2: Judge Dee Chronologies
3: China in American Fiction: A Chronology
Chapter Notes
Bibliography
List of Names and Terms
Acknowledgements
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the direct support of Lincoln University, which granted me the sabbatical that enabled me to complete this project. The interlibrary loan department at the Langston Hughes Memorial Library has been, on several occasions, very helpful. My principal resource has been the well-stocked Morris Library of the University of Delaware.
Indirect support always outweighs direct support in importance; cataloging it is difficult (and never complete), and it can hardly matter to readers other than those it names. Still. I would mention first my students at Nankai University (Tianjin, PRC), who welcomed me in spring 2000 as I taught, among other things, a seminar on the American detective story. Then there is the Fulbright exchange program, which placed me in Nankai and, at other points in my career, placed me in Tübingen, Stuttgart, and Vienna. All four Fulbright appointments enabled me to teach a course on the detective story. The Mystery and Detection Section of the Popular Culture Association has, since 1982, welcomed me to present papers on many occasions; I am grateful for their kind reception. In 1992, the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsored a summer seminar on the detective as historian. The seed of this book was planted when the director, Robin Winks, asked the seminar, Who likes van Gulik? I was among those who raised a hand; I liked Judge Dee very much. When the obvious follow-up question—Why?—was addressed specifically to me, I stumbled, unable to articulate exactly what it was that so impressed me. The Judge Dee Novels is, decades later, an attempt finally to provide an answer.
And then there are the friends whose encouragement keeps one going and whose questions sometimes provoke unexpected new thoughts: Iris Katharina and Jörg, Lisa and Bruno, Viola and Juan, Rosie and Brian. Bruno, I think, is almost persuaded that detective fiction is, indeed, literature. And, nameless here because so numerous, I would thank all the colleagues and students who have made three and a half decades at Lincoln so rewarding.
Above all and as always, I thank Sarala, my wife, who, though she deserves so much more, must be satisfied with her own short paragraph here, and, a few pages earlier, an even shorter but entirely sincere dedication.
Preface
The Judge Dee novels are the remarkable accomplishment of a remarkable man. Robert Hans van Gulik managed, in his 57 years, to excel in three fields. Entering the Dutch foreign service in 1935, he rose to the rank of ambassador, with his final appointment as Ambassador to Japan and Korea from 1965 to his death in 1967. At the same time, he was an active scholar. Between 1928 and 1967, he published nearly twenty scholarly monographs and at least three dozen scholarly articles in fields as diverse as Native American vocabulary, Sanskrit, the Chinese lute, erotic art, and the Chinese gibbon. And in 1950, he began a career as a popular novelist, composing a series of 15 novels, 2 novellas, and 8 short stories featuring the Tang dynasty detective, Judge Dee (and, as well, a non–Dee novel, The Given Day, set in contemporary Amsterdam).
Van Gulik’s ability to pursue these diverse interests simultaneously and successfully impressed his American editor at Scribner, Harry Blague, who asked how he managed it. Van Gulik replied:
My diplomatic work is exclusively concerned with matters of temporary significance. Therefore scholarly research gives me a welcome refuge, for everything one does in that field has permanent value—even one’s mistakes, for those will enable other workers to do better! However, serious scholarly work implies one must be a slave of the facts, and strictly control one’s imagination. Therefore, the writing of fiction, where one is the undisputed master of the facts and may give free rein to one’s imagination, has become an indispensible third facet of my activities, a real relaxation that keeps my interest in diplomatic and scholarly work alive. If my novels also give relaxation to the reader—so much the better!” [letter to Harry Blague, 6 January 1967, reprinted in “Robert Hans van Gulik 1910–1967”: 386].
Most readers derive more than relaxation from the Judge Dee novels; they enter a fictional world that develops its own fascinating reality, but which is also grounded in an accurate representation of an actual culture that is distant from them in both space and time.
Van Gulik’s initial engagement with the matter of Judge Dee came in his translation of the first half of Dee Goong An, a Qing dynasty novel featuring Magistrate Dee, set in the Tang dynasty but, with deliberate anachronism, employing the customs of the Ming dynasty; that is, Dee Goong An is a native Dutch speaker’s 20th-century English version of the first half of an 18th-/19th-century Chinese novel set in the eighth century, and observing 15th-century Chinese customs. Over the course of the decade and a half (1950–1967) in which van Gulik produced his own original cases of Judge Dee, the Judge’s world came to cover many aspects of traditional Chinese culture as it also evolved a private world of Dee’s personal relationships with his wives, his lieutenants, and the citizens whom he was dedicated to serving on behalf of his emperor.
“Chapter One: Judge Dee and the Two Traditions of the Detective Story” explores two contexts relevant to van Gulik’s achievement with the Dee novels: the Chinese detective story and the Western detective story. In the scholarly apparatus that he attached to his 1949 translation, Dee Goong An, Van Gulik provided an account of the key features of the Chinese tradition of detective fiction. Using this account as a starting point, this chapter provides a perspective upon the traditional Chinese model of detective fiction that van Gulik was trying to revive. It also offers a brief look at how some 20th-century Chinese detective story writers—van Gulik’s contemporaries—were responding to arrival of the Western model of detective fiction, and adapting it for Chinese audiences. The second part of Chapter One turns from van Gulik’s sources in the Chinese tradition to look at how the Judge Dee novels fit into the Anglophone tradition of det
ective fiction. The apparatus attached to Dee Goong An also provides useful indications of what van Gulik saw as the landmark writers of English and American detective stories. The Judge Dee series itself qualifies as a landmark innovation in the development of the genre; Chapter One attempts to indicate important aspects of its originality and influence.
“Chapter Two: The Judge Dee Novels” is made up of self-contained reports on all of the Judge Dee texts that van Gulik published. These are grouped in four sections: the translation, Dee Goong An, stands by itself; then there are the five original novels which map the five-stage career as district magistrate that van Gulik plotted for his detective; then there are the nine volumes (seven novels, two novellas, eight short stories) in which van Gulik fleshes out phases of the Judge’s service; and finally there are the last two novels in what van Gulik would call “a new Judge Dee series,” in which the Judge “appears all alone … in an unusual and brand-new situation.” These reports serve two functions. Each begins with a list of characters and brief plot summaries of each case that the Judge is investigating in the novel or story. This is intended to orient readers, reminding them of the content of works that they have read or guiding them toward the choice of works they might want to read. Care is taken not to reveal the identity of villains in the capsule summaries. Such care is not taken in the “Comments” that follow the capsules, though culprits are not revealed unnecessarily. The Comments focus either upon aspects of the novel as fiction (plot, character, setting, theme) or, when appropriate, upon aspects of the novel’s relation to Chinese culture and history. Each report ends with a brief summary of the critical reception of the novel.
“Chapter Three: From Heathen Chinee to Magistrate Dee” develops the way China has been depicted in the literature—primarily the novel, and primarily the popular novel—read by Americans over the course of the 20th century. Van Gulik, who lived only briefly in the United States, was not necessarily writing specifically in reaction to the images of China that had been depicted in American literature for a century or more, but he was necessarily read by Americans in that context, and it may be useful to provide a sketch of the literary landscape against which his novels were read. This chapter examines the representation of China in American literature according to the class (the “brows”) toward which the representation was addressed. “Highbrow,” “middlebrow,” “lowbrow” are loose categories, but nonetheless useful. Given the popular genre in which van Gulik was working, most attention has been paid to the middlebrow (bestselling) and the lowbrow (genre) images of China.
The book concludes with three appendices, the first a discussion of the six “ages” of American relations with China, the second a Judge Dee chronology, and the third chronology of China in American fiction.
Van Gulik’s writings, both his scholarship and his fiction, have received some attention from critics. He was an active correspondent with sinologists of his time, and was well-respected in the field. His ground-breaking work on sex and eroticism in Chinese life and art, for example, has been especially influential. Van Gulik’s Sexual Life in Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from ca. 1500 BC Till 1644 AD (1961) was a major influence upon Michel Foucault. According to Leon Antonio Rocha, Foucault probably derived his knowledge of the Chinese “ars erotica” as opposed to the Christian West’s “scientia sexualis”—a crucial binary in his History of Sexuality Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure—“exclusively” from van Gulik (334).
The most substantial treatment of van Gulik as a novelist has come from Janwillem van de Wetering, himself a major Dutch writer of detective fiction in English. Van de Wetering wrote a book-length appreciation, Robert van Gulik: His Life, His Work, which is full of suggestive detail. There have as well been a few academic articles on the Judge Dee novels, such as William C. Summers on The Chinese Nail Murders, but for the most part commentary on Judge Dee has depended upon Wikipedia and websites developed by dedicated fans of the series. The most comprehensive, in English and in Dutch, seems to be Judge-Dee.info (www.judge-dee.info/welcome/index.jsp); other useful sites include Ti Jen-chieh, or Di Renjie Judge Dee 630–700 (www.friesian.com/ross/dee.htm), Robert van Gulik (www.judge-dee.info/welcome/index.jsp), and Sven Roussel’s Le Juge Ti (www.judge-dee.com/?lng=fr). I have benefited greatly from the information compiled by these sites, and I hope that the Judge’s fans will see The Judge Dee Novels as advancing the appreciation of van Gulik as a significant contributor to the development of the genre of detective fiction.
The relationship between China and the West generally (and between China and the United States specifically) has been well-studied. There are shelves of books on the economic, political, demographic, and cultural relations between the two. (I must take this opportunity to say what will be obvious to any sinologist: I am not a sinologist. I do not read Chinese, and, aside from a happy semester at Nankai University in Tianjin, my understanding of Chinese culture comes entirely from sources published in English.) Even within the area of popular culture, there has been an active examination of the Chinese and Chinese-American contribution to American literature, fine arts, and especially cinema. The last decade has, to take one example, seen the publication of at least a half dozen books on the career of the film actress Anna May Wong. The Judge Dee Novels also makes, I hope, a further contribution to this growing area of study.
I should, finally, add that my use of “Western” juxtaposed to “Chinese” is not intended to offend. Both terms oversimplify enormously complex cultural entities—“China” as well as “the West” represents a multitude, but surely the terms are not meaningless. By “Western detective story,” I usually mean little more than “Anglophone detective story,” but “English and American detective story” becomes awkward when repeated too often (and itself may not be entirely accurate, although I was rarely thinking of any Irish, Scottish, Canadian, Australian, Indian, etc. detective story writers in particular). And obviously I am even using “American” with conventional looseness; there might well be distinct African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Gay American, Catholic American, etc. responses to China and to the Judge Dee series, and these would certainly be worth identifying and investigating. Much fruitful work has been done recently by centering on the margins; the margins of detective fiction are unusually wide, and a focus upon the ethnic detective, or the religious detective, or the feminist detective, or the gay detective will discover rich veins, with fascinating histories and diverse implications. But from Dupin to Easy Rawlins, there is a mainstream that is to some degree (and sometimes to a great degree) redirected by what at the time may seem marginal figures, and it is to this mainstream as it existed in the first two-thirds of the 20th century to which I am generally referring.
A Note on Transliteration
The Romanization of the tonal sounds of Chinese has been a vexed issue. The most common system employed in the English-speaking world for the first two-thirds of the 20th century was Wade-Giles, a system first developed in the 19th century by Thomas Wade, and revised in its finished form by Herbert Giles in 1892. In the 1950s, the People’s Republic of China developed the Pinyin system, which, as of 1958, became the official system of transliteration on the mainland. The Republic of China (Taiwan) continued to prefer Wade-Giles. Politics (and an understandable inertia, given a century of texts with names in the older form) thus led to a division in presenting Chinese names: Mao Tse-tung or Mao Zedong? Chou En-lai or Zhou Enlai? In 1982 the International Organization for Standardization accepted Pinyin; Taiwan held out until 2009, when it too accepted Pinyin.
To add one more small layer of confusion, van Gulik developed his own system of Romanization. Thus, the Judge’s name is rendered “Dee Jen-djieh” by van Gulik. In Pinyin it is “Dí Rénjié” (without the tonal markers, “Di Renjie”). In Wade-Giles, it would be “Ti Jen-chieh.” Lin Yutang renders it “Di Renjiay.” I use “Dee” to refer to the Judge in the novels and “Di” when referring to the historical judge.<
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Nearly all of the pre–1970 authorities that I cite use Wade-Giles; most (but not all) of the post–1990 authorities use Pinyin. I have sometimes provided the alternative transliteration in parenthesis. I have usually tried to choose the spelling that draws least attention to itself: if I have quoted a source that uses Wade-Giles, I continue with Wade-Giles; if later on, I quote a source that uses Pinyin for the same referent, I continue with Pinyin. When there is no immediate precedent, I default to Pinyin.
Confusion can be reduced by remembering a few basic equivalents:
Thus “Kuomintang” in Wade-Giles is intended to be pronounced roughly as it is spelled in Pinyin, “Guomindang”; the Wade-Giles T’ang is pronounced “Tang” (as it is spelled in Pinyin), but the Wade-Giles “Teng” (as in Mao Tse-teng) is pronounced “Dong” (Mao Zedong).
An Additional Note
To lessen confusion, I try to follow my source’s spelling in other respects as well. For example, van Gulik uses the spelling “Uiger” for the Turkic people who inhabit the western areas of China. This was the standard in his time. Today the Uyghur people prefer “Uyghur.” I use “Uyghur” when talking about the people, but I use “Uiger” when referring to the characters whom van Gulik calls “Uigers.”
Introduction: The Historical Dí Rénjié (Judge Di)
Dí Rénjié (Wade-Giles: Ti Jen-chieh; van Gulik: Dee Jen-djieh) has had two important identities in Chinese culture. For a millennium following his death at the age of seventy in 700, he was celebrated in China as one of the heroes of the restoration of the Tang dynasty (618–907) following the notorious interruption of the Empress Wu’s brief “Zhou” (Chou) dynasty (690–705). This identity as a Tang loyalist was celebrated (and to some degree constructed) by scholars and historians, beginning within a half century of his death. He was one of the few high-ranking administrators in the Empress’s famously corrupt court who managed to survive with his integrity intact, avoiding the traps set by her nefarious courtiers while secretly working to secure the succession of her son, Li Xian (Li Hsien), the legitimate Tang heir to the throne.
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