This panel offers four studies of narrative causality in Chinese fiction and drama from the 12^th century to late 19^thcentury. Scholars considered the rhetoric of causality in early modern (Ming and Qing) Chinese fiction in light of “the moral and aesthetic dimensions of causal linkage” (McMahon). Represented by a “double dialectical” relation between aestheticism and didacticism, causality channels a continuity between events local and distant, past and present, predetermined closure and open-ended impulse. Attributions of causality and purpose inexorably embed teleological spatial and temporal relations between characters, and their preordained encounters. Yet early modern vernacular narratives manifest a rich tableau which contests and transforms the discourse of causality through heterogenous performance traditions, thickened affective protonarratives, and boundless employments. These narratives display how inchoate events and affective experiences contribute to a dialectical understanding of causality and its pluralist reconfigurations of narrative possibilities, subjectivity, and audience interpretations.

Canaan Morse’s presentation “Causality and ‘performance arena’ in Tripitaka Fetches the Scriptures and some early huaben” asks: how does narrative causality function in a tale that presumes the reader knows what will happen? Many of China’s earliest vernacular narrative texts periodically foretell their endings, presenting the experience of reading as a process of recognition. Those same texts also feature logical “gaps” that complicate independent readings. This paper demonstrates how several of these texts, from the 12^th-13^th-century poem-tale Tripitaka Fetches the Scriptures to the early huaben tales transfer responsibility for generating causality onto the reader by invoking a rhetorical “performance arena,” an interpretive frame common to oral performance which invites the reader to participate in narrative-making as an act of revivifying a tradition. Familiarizing ourselves as best we can with the linguistic keys to this frame redefines sites of apparent absence as sites of contact with said tradition(s).

Wenbo Chang considers the dialectics of causality in light of the disjunction between arias and spoken dialogue in two early Ming courtesan plays Fu luo chang and Xiangnang yuan by Zhu Youdun (1379 – 1439). Traditional Chinese theater is known for its lyricism of arias, while spoken dialogue functions to move the plot forward. Yuan zaju drama’s convention of one single singing role decides what is expressed in arias the center of consciousness, the perspective from which events narrated in the dialogue and non-singing characters are evaluated and commented upon. By examining the interplay between the arias and the spoken dialogue, this paper investigates how closed orthodox values are contextualized and challenged by open-ended contingencies. It helps us to have a more nuanced understanding of Zhu’s plays as self-styling entertainment and draws attention to the importance of the spoken dialogue that deserves more studies than it has received so far.

Zhaokun Xin’s presentation “Karmic Retribution Emotionally Thickened: Shrewish Anger in the Xingshi yinyuan zhuan” considers how affect theory expands understandings of narrative causality. Karmic retribution serves as one of the most important frameworks of narrative causality in late imperial Chinese fiction, a case in point for which is the seventeenth century work Marriage as Retribution Awakening the World. This paper will compare the work with classical stories on karmic retribution from the collectanea entitled Extensive Records of the Taiping Era (978). Rather than focusing on deed-oriented retribution, Marriage devotes extensive narrative energy to the role of shrews’ anger in mobilizing such causality. The emotion ascribes both an affective and traumatic quality to the causal framework of karmic retribution, which arises from the shrews’ repeated references to the unaccountability of anger in the work. Differing from the largely deed-based retribution in earlier stories, anger emotionally thickens karmic causality in Marriage.

Finally, Li Guo examines emplotment, narrative causality, and the question of crossdressing in women’s tanci, or chantefable fiction, including Destiny of Rebirth (eighteenth century), Dream of the Pomegranate Flowers (1841), Blossoms from the Brush (nineteenth century). Whereas Ming and Qing fiction reasserted a form of causality into realistic narratives, Guo considers women’s amplification of causality through emplotment in tanci, which illustrate heroines who, forced by family calamities, leave home and travel in male disguise, becoming court ministers, diplomats, or military generals. How do the actions of the crossdressed heroine transcend the mimetic arc underlying the plotline of predestined love and marriage? What dialectical tensions do the texts reveal about the causal connection between narrative determinism and gendered reconfigurations of the heroine’s identity? How do digression and open-endedness problematize the need of refeminization, i.e., her return to traditional gender roles, and create alternative aesthetics and spaces of living for women?