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brightknightie) wrote2023-01-10 09:37 pm
brightknightie) wrote2023-01-10 09:37 pm
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JttW fight-scene poems as sixteenth-century montages (just thinking)
People (especially film people) often observe that montages can exist only in the film medium. Some offer that collage splash pages in comics can have the same effect, but no one I know of argues that you can really get a montage via prose.
But poetry? It's taken many chapters of the unabridged translation for this to dawn on me, but that's how the author of The Journey to the West seems to be specifically using his occasional, inserted poems (which don't appear in any of the abridged versions). That they're integral to the narrative was apparent fairly early. Now that I'm deeper in, I've noticed that they fall into three clear categories, and the two largest of those categories seem to aim for the effect of highly-visual montages.
The author renders most of his climactic fights/duels/battles as poems (and, at least in the translation, they're usually brisk and dynamic -- maybe not counting the shape-shifter duel). You can fairly sum up most of the fights as "and they fought and it was awesome," to quote OSP's summaries, yet under the hood, these fight-poems seem strikingly like film montages, juxtaposing this motion or object or symbol or memory against that.
Similarly, when the author introduces a new set for the next episode/escapade -- a new mountain, desert, river, city -- he usually does it through a poem that reads like a montage of establishing shots.
(The third group of poems -- the smallest poems, often just couplets -- comes when the author writes, "And as testimony, we have this poem," where he then inserts a few lines, as if quoting someone else who had written it about the incident or character between when the story happened and when he wrote his novel (the endnotes indicate that these are not real quotations). These clearly serve a different function.)
P.S. I've discovered an amusing JttW podcast: "Journey of the Monkey King." Each episode, the host, who has read the novel, tells an unspoiled friend about one chapter of JttW, and the unspoiled friend reacts. [Addendum, 1/14: The podcasts tries so very hard to be sensitive to 16th-century Chinese culture that they sometimes miss the jokes. JttW's author was making fun of many of these things; we're supposed to laugh at them, not take them direly seriously.]
But poetry? It's taken many chapters of the unabridged translation for this to dawn on me, but that's how the author of The Journey to the West seems to be specifically using his occasional, inserted poems (which don't appear in any of the abridged versions). That they're integral to the narrative was apparent fairly early. Now that I'm deeper in, I've noticed that they fall into three clear categories, and the two largest of those categories seem to aim for the effect of highly-visual montages.
The author renders most of his climactic fights/duels/battles as poems (and, at least in the translation, they're usually brisk and dynamic -- maybe not counting the shape-shifter duel). You can fairly sum up most of the fights as "and they fought and it was awesome," to quote OSP's summaries, yet under the hood, these fight-poems seem strikingly like film montages, juxtaposing this motion or object or symbol or memory against that.
Similarly, when the author introduces a new set for the next episode/escapade -- a new mountain, desert, river, city -- he usually does it through a poem that reads like a montage of establishing shots.
(The third group of poems -- the smallest poems, often just couplets -- comes when the author writes, "And as testimony, we have this poem," where he then inserts a few lines, as if quoting someone else who had written it about the incident or character between when the story happened and when he wrote his novel (the endnotes indicate that these are not real quotations). These clearly serve a different function.)
P.S. I've discovered an amusing JttW podcast: "Journey of the Monkey King." Each episode, the host, who has read the novel, tells an unspoiled friend about one chapter of JttW, and the unspoiled friend reacts. [Addendum, 1/14: The podcasts tries so very hard to be sensitive to 16th-century Chinese culture that they sometimes miss the jokes. JttW's author was making fun of many of these things; we're supposed to laugh at them, not take them direly seriously.]