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From History to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative . By Sheldon Hsiao-Peng Lu. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. viii, 213 pp.

This brief but ambitious comparative study spans from Herodotus to the Shu Jing and Honglou meng, and even more daringly, bridges the theoretical chasm between Confucius the transmitter, Aristotle the master plotweaver, and Derrida, who would like to deconstruct them both. As Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu states in the postscript, he would like to see Chinese narrative studies progress beyond purely formalist concerns, which are "basically interested in abstract, temporal structures detached from historical, ideological, and discursive contexts," in favor of an approach that addresses questions of ideology and history (p. 158). The ideological force that Lu questions throughout the study is the legitimating power of historical discourse in China, and the complex relationship between it and xiaoshuo, the marginal histories and fictions that both exploit and explode the conventions of orthodox writings. The core of the study is a comparative analysis that highlights the differences between Western and Chinese genealogies of discourses. In "Rectifying the Terms, I: 'Narrative,' 'History,' and 'Fiction' in the West," Lu succinctly lays out the crux of the problem in comparative narratology. According to Aristotelian taxonomies, "history is characterized by seriality, parataxis, contingency, and sequentiality, whereas poetry is a unified, coherent whole organized by a central plot" (p. 32). For the Greeks, though the term histor was used to refer to someone who could distinguish which of two accounts was correct, in practice historia was a literary genre where exact precision could be fudged for the sake of rhetorical effect. Aristotle made drama, with its unity of action and clear structure of beginning, middle, and end, the dominant narrative genre; Thucidydes' account of the Peloponnesian War follows these dramatic dictates by reconstructing the great speeches of the war according to the rhetorical demands of each particular situation. In actuality, a thin line distinguishes fiction from history in classical taxonomies, even though Plato's stance was that fiction, as an imitation of the Truth, could only distort. Aristotle's view won out: he argued that the lessons of history would be lost without the craft of the historian to emplot the events in morally forceful narratives. In his history of how the universal truths of Poesy triumphed over the specific truths of history during the Renaissance, Lu would have done well to go beyond classical and neoclassical debates to include a section on the impact of fourfold Christian allegory, as a structuring and interpretive practice, in further diminishing the truth value of history in the European West.