Jin Yong as ‘China’s Tolkien’: A Serendipitous Misconception?

Abstract

The late Jin Yong (pen-name of Dr Louis Cha) was one of the world’s bestselling novelists of all time, as well as one of the most popular Chinese-language authors ever. The enduring influence of his cultural impact on the Chinese-speaking regions of the world continues to be seen across a range of creative media, including film, television and video games. However, he remains little-known in the Anglophone world, due in part to his novels’ infusion with culturally esoteric concepts, religions and traditions, as well as a lack of available English-language translations of his lengthy novels, especially those with sufficient introductions. Jin Yong is frequently referred to as ‘China’s Tolkien’ in English-language media, which tends to be the extent of the Anglophone world’s exposure to him. The logic behind this comparison is seldom articulated, other than general observations on their widespread cultural impact and brief assertions that they are both leading exponents of ‘fantasy’ within their respective literary cultures. While the cultural comparison has obvious merit, the literary comparison is problematically facile for a number of reasons, chief among which is the fact that Jin Yong’s novels are not works of high fantasy, and therefore lack all the idiosyncratic trappings thereof — fantastical creatures and peoples, an entirely fictional world, magic and so on. Indeed, ‘Jinologists’ often cite Sir Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas — authors of historical romance whom Jin Yong himself appreciated and acknowledged as influences — as more appropriate literary comparisons. However, although the popular Tolkien-Jin Yong comparison has obvious basic shortcomings with regard to genre classification, there are in fact striking, unusual and as-yet-unexplored parallels in the motivations and impulses behind the authors’ respective processes of composition. This proposed paper would explore several formal aspects of the authors’ construction of the medievalist past — a crucial factor in their enduring success in capturing the public consciousness. These aspects would include: allusion to ancient literature; use of ancient language; and use of prosimetrum. The poetics of temporality therein would be considered, and through this, creative commonalities would be identified in the philological foundation of Tolkien’s fiction and the historical foundation of Jin Yong’s. The proposed paper would thereby demonstrate how what may seem like a fundamentally flawed literary comparison between two of the most popular cultural phenomena of all time in fact presents unique and serendipitous opportunities to develop a comparative poetics of medievalist historical romance.