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This presentation reinterprets the richest account we have of oral storytelling in imperial China, the opening chapter of the 13th-century anthology The Drunken Man’s Talk (Zuiweng tanlu), from a perspective grounded in oral narrative studies. It advocates for reading this famous chapter as a “charter text,” a phenomenon of other oral traditions in which a textual narrative claims to represent a lost “original” text reconstituted via oral tradition. This reading demonstrates that of the chapter’s most confusing features—its exaggerated affirmation of performers’ literary erudition and access to rare books— denotes not an historical reality but a rhetorical mechanism, by which the storyteller invokes images of “literariness” as symbols of immanent culture and transforms them into sources of performative power through a “performance of reading” that is, above all, a display of verbal art. This vision of a symbiotic, non-teleological relationship between text and performance opens new perspectives on the communicative power of performance literature in imperial China and the narrative practices that created it.

Canaan Morse is a postdoctoral associate and lecturer in the Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Virginia. A long-time devotee (and former on-stage performer) of northern Chinese oral performance, he studies interactions between spoken and written traditions in imperial Chinese literature. His current book project, Reading as Reliving: Tradition and Transmediality in Vernacular Chinese Fiction demonstrates how many of the texts that guided China’s burgeoning canon of vernacular fiction invoke receptive contexts that reference multiple narrative traditions. In addition, his translations of contemporary Chinese novels have won the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation and been named a Finalist in the 2021 National Book Awards.