Three Levels

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Three Levels of Composition of the Rulin Waishi
ZBIGNIEW SLUPSKI
WarsawUniversity

(henceforth abbreviated to RLWS),' 1 or An Unofficial Chronicle the Confucian of Scholars, principal the work of WuJingzi MM which was written in the 1730s and 1740s, has seldom been accordedstrictly literary analysis.2 It has been the subject of a number of books and articles, mostly, however, devoted to accounts of Wu Jingzi's life, or to discussions of the historical figures and facts presented in RLWS, and of the light in which they appear there. Similarly, the ideological attitude of the work has also often come under close scrutiny. Yet comparatively little attention has so farbeen paid to its inner organization, an issue that has usually been dismissed with general comments about the loose structure of the work. Most scholars have tended to follow the well-known
All references are to the first (1955) Zuojia chubanshe edition. (The copy I am using comes from the third [1957] printing.) The text is identical with the 1954 Zuojia chubanshe edition, also marked as first.The two editions differ only in format. It was not until I had finished this paper that I learned about the publication of Li Hanqiu's 4:kk edition of ; in 2 vols., by the Shanghai guji RLWS entitled Rulin waishihuijiao huiping ben chubanshe, in 1984. In this edition various known texts of RLWS have been compared and commentaries included; simplified characters have been used. 2 In the presentpaper I have reconsidered certain problems discussed in my book on RLWS completed in July 1977. (Zbigniew Slupski, Ju-lin wai-shih:Probaanalizy literackiej [Rulin waishi: An Attemptat a LiteraryAnalysis] Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu
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and the 1979).In thisbookI presented discussed existingbodyof published Warszawskiego, raisedarenoted referring the questions toresearch the subject.Morerecentpublications on in the appropriate context.
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6

ZBIGNIEW

SLUPSKI

views of relations nect this accepted and the

Lu Xun and Hu Shi rather than to try and analyze inner which are not always obvious, and yetwhich bind and conwork into a coherent whole.3 In recent years, however, this view of the loose structure of RLWS has been questioned time for reinterpretation seems ripe.4 The need for this

3 Many historians of Chinese literature have written about the "loose structure" of RLWS. Here, I quote in illustration only a few of the most outstanding specialists on Chinese literature. Thus, for instance,Lu Xun said: "The novel has no central linking element (wu "Various characters are introduced in succession, their stories starting zhu gan : with their appearance and ending with their exit from the stage. So this long novel is like a See Lu Xun CB, group of short stories . . . it lacks one great design (feijufu 4ff)." shilue 'J'J8S (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1953), p. 231; and Zongguo...