The Road of the Azure Sky

5,013 characters2010.05.20

After being busy for a stretch, one should, as usual, allow oneself a little indulgence. Before I begin my book-scanning plan, let me first finish scanning a whole manga series……

Stirred by the new Three Kingdoms TV drama, I remembered this masterpiece, hailed as the best Three Kingdoms manga. Back when I watched the animated version—the first season was roughly equivalent to a third or a quarter of the manga—I already had a sense of being dazzled. In the first few episodes I still couldn’t quite make out what was special about it, and thought it was just another little-Japanese gag on the Three Kingdoms, until I saw the appearances of Yuan Shao, Sun Jian, and Liu Bei, and realized that this was no ordinary work.

Cang Tian Hang Lu takes the Records of the Three Kingdoms as its basis, completely skips Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and, with Cao Cao as its main thread, composes a modern manga version of “romance.” If Romance of the Three Kingdoms is three parts truth and seven parts fiction, then Cang Tian Hang Lu probably isn’t any more fictitious.

Although the Chinese classical “romance” tradition emphasizes dramatizing qualities such as loyalty, filial piety, benevolence, and righteousness, it does not emphasize the shaping of “personality.” The heroic figures created by romances always give one the sense of being formulaic, or, one might say, stereotyped: The Tale of Tang, The Tale of Yue, the Yang Family Generals, and so on—no matter how you look at them, they’re basically just a few masks applied everywhere. The thousand-year masterpieces like Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin are of course much more accomplished, but even they are mostly heavy on narrative and light on the depiction of character. Moreover, most of the descriptions are from the perspective of an observer, and the portrayal of the characters’ inner worlds, interests, temperaments, and dispositions is pitifully scant. And the qualities presented are mainly the virtues of “military men,” such as loyalty, righteousness, wisdom, and valor: how valiant and skilled in battle Guan, Zhang, and Zhao are; how Zhuge and Sima maneuver from behind the curtain; how the loyal ministers are brave and fearless, laboring to the very end, and so on. Yet what exactly is it that their “loyalty” is loyal to, and what exactly is it that their “valor” does? The qualities of those “lords” are precisely the most threadbare.

Moreover, the so-called Romance of the Three Kingdoms’ praise of Liu and denigration of Cao is not merely a matter of the author’s value orientation; it also concerns the creative method and the creative idea itself. Traditional romance writing often clearly divides characters into red-faced and white-faced roles, either wholly righteous or wholly evil, either exalted or denigrated; those opposed to the heroic protagonist can only be villains. This view of history and mode of historical narration remains deeply ingrained even now, when we narrate the history of the founding of New China—when we wish to exalt one side, we are bound to uglify its enemies, who are either ridiculous clowns or sinister fiends. Opposing sides with radically different paths are all depicted as heroes.

But the person who belittles his own opponent is not a hero, but a thug. Only a thug would, while beating an opponent over and over—whether he wins or loses—also insult or denounce the opponent’s inadequacies; that is the thug’s logic. The hero’s logic, by contrast, is to revere the opponent: the nobler the opponent, the nobler the one who contends with him.

Perhaps someone would say: although the hero’s opponent is militarily powerful, his virtue is still base, so the hero is the one who opposes evil and fights a just war. Of course such situations do occur—for example, a thug may, by some stroke of chance, become a nouveau riche, or even a dictator, while his character remains base. But to glorify oneself by playing up the baseness of one’s opponent is still the logic of a thug.

The new Three Kingdoms TV drama claims that it “does not exalt Liu while denigrating Cao,” and that is a joke. In fact, the characters in this drama are even paler, even more stereotyped; it merely replaces the red-faced and white-faced stereotypes in the director’s and screenwriter’s minds with modern soap-opera-style stereotypes dressed in the red-face and white-face makeup of classical Peking opera, and they are still just masks. What exactly was Cao Cao pursuing? What exactly were Liu Bei and Sun Ce pursuing? What exactly were Yuan Shao and Lü Bu pursuing? What exactly were Guan Yu, Zhao Yun, Zhang Liao, and Xiahou Dun pursuing? What exactly were Guo Jia, Xun Yu, Jia Xu, and Zhuge Liang pursuing? Traditional or fairy-tale-like narratives either ignore people’s pursuits altogether, or else reduce such pursuits to a simplistic pattern of loyalty and righteousness or private desire.

Cang Tian Hang Lu interprets the Three Kingdoms and understands Cao Cao in a unique way. Why did Cao Cao—an extraordinary genius who combined in one body the qualities of statesman, military strategist, and man of letters—become a treacherous hero? If what he pursued was neither fame nor profit, then what exactly was it? And to honor Cao does not necessarily mean to denigrate Liu; Liu Bei’s image, too, receives a distinctive interpretation. The configuration of the Three Kingdoms era was a struggle among warlords, a contest between heroes and heroes.

Besides One Piece, Cang Tian Hang Lu is also a rare work that is full of a “masculine” aura. Lately I seem to have been in a state of having too much yin and not enough yang; though the road of the demon king has already begun, it clearly lacks momentum. Let Cang Tian Hang Lu help me return to the demon’s path~

20 May 2010