手稿研究与手稿学的展望
冯铁
（维也纳大学、布拉迪斯拉发靠门斯基大学）
There is a striking paradox in dealing with manuscripts in Chinese literary studies: On the one hand, there is a tradition of more than one millennium with a sophisticated terminology fed by a great number of interesting and accurate observations that developed in the framework of Song dynasty 校勘研究; on the other hand, even within the very marginalized fields of 版本研究 and the so-called 史料研究 of present-day literary research, manuscripts in turn play an even more marginal role, quenched between the poles of asking how changes in different printed editions 版本 came about, of consulting 史料 as mere auxiliary material in order find an answer, and collectors’ interests—including institutional collectors who have withdrawn a considerable amount of manuscript material to the increasingly important market. How comes then, that 手搞研究 is still in such a marginal position? The present article attempts at answering this question, and has the ambition to propose possible ways of relief.
By extension, it may be said that the debate about 古文 and 今文 already presented an embryonic state of 手搞研究 that started when 刘歆claimed to have shown that manuscripts of Confucian writing supposedly found in the ruins of his ancestors’ house in Qufu and were used to provide legitimacy for 王莽’s short-lived rule. The leading question was of course: Which writings may claim higher authenticity? Yet when in Song times scholars started to develop what has become known as 版本研究, they dominantly handled wood-block editions of all sorts of writings, they catered to the needs of wealthy collectors who wanted to protect themselves against forgery, and only occasionally dealt with manuscripts. Their question was: Is the item genuine or false? Though of course 抄本 remained the most important medium of circulation of respectively contemporary writings (and have re-acquired this status during the Cultural Revolution) far into the 19th century, and the first wood-block edition of an author’s works frequently was posthumous and became the first step into canonization (with the exception of the very few early ‘professional’ writers, such as 袁枚).
When modern printing technologies (mainly the quick composition and the possibility to produce an almost unlimited number of copies) invaded China at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, and even more so in the wake of the May Fourth movement, when any technique of scrupuously examining texts and variant versions (异文) were altogether discarded as belonging to ‘traditional learning’. 手搞研究 have ever since not recovered from being pushed into a small niche (壁龛) for a minority of aficionados. Among the early oft hem as 刘半农 with his facsimile edition of 《初期白话诗稿》（1933年）who has had several followers. One of the underlying perspectives is for sure that the transmission of texts is considered ‘stable’ with the emergence of modern printing technology, while the contrary has been convincingly shown, as in 金宏宇《中国现代长篇小说名著版本校评》（2004年）.
Even the few works that try to get out this niche are extremely self-conscious in limiting their scope—and thus avoiding any farther-reaching consequences as for 手搞研究：朱正 in his 《鲁迅手稿管窥》（1981年）not only expresses concentration on one single author, but also in the very title declares his perspective as subjective (“管窥”)—and thus implicitly irrelevant for generalizations. In 朱金顺，《新闻学资料引论》（1986年）—a work that appears on many compulsory readings list of modern Chinese literature—, manuscripts are only dealt with sloppily on a few pages, but certainly not considered as essential sources. The same goes for 倪其心，《校勘学大纲》（1987年） for which it is signifant that it only saw a second edition almost tow decades after its first publication (2004). All these publications are discussing manuscripts strictly within the framework of 史料研究. The very first attempt, to my knowledge, not only to analyze meticulously the spatial and temporal situation of the manuscript of a literary text of modern Chinese literature, but also to transpose the assessment into a representation that includes all interventions and makes them transparent to the reader, however, is by 华融（即王锡荣）who produced and commented extensively a critical edition 评订本 of the hitherto unpublished translation from English of the first part of 密克沙特 (Kalmán Mikszáth, 1847–1910) novel Szent Péter eserny?je (今译《圣彼得的伞》，1895年) and therefore provided a genuinely ‘critical edition’ （“神盖记”、“对于《神盖记》译稿”，载《上海鲁迅研究》4期1991年）. Though of course scholars have occasionally given detailed descriptions of manuscripts (and are still doing so), they had all remained discoursive, without making this last decisive step, i.e. to produce a text organized such that interventions on a (in this case: single) manuscripts are visible. It is my firm belief that modern Chinese manuscript studies have proceed on this course.
‘Western’ manuscript studies have not had an origin much different from their Chinese counterpart. They are clearly a child of the Renaissance, and their initial question was: Which are the authentic versions of the (Biblical) writings? In both cases, a historical ‘truth’ was at play which played a decisive role in legitimation (of an imperial rule or of a powerful religious system). In Europe, efforts at finding empirically sound answers triggered the learning of Greek and Hebrew, the most important languages of the New and Old Testament, as well as—to a lesser extent—of other languages relevant to the written Biblical traditions, such as Aramaic, Syriac, Hethitic, ancient Egyptian etc. It is only in the 18th and 19th centuries, however, that methodological tools were developped to represent systematically and according to uniform principles ancients manuscripts from archeological finds (e.g. the works by Sappho), and more recently produced texts (e.g. the works by Goethe). These principles began to become essentially challenged when, basically starting with Romanticism and fully developping in Modernity, linearity (i.e. an unambiguous organization of a text, and therefore its manuscript, in space with a clear temporal sequence of ‘before’ and ‘after’) became dubious. Fine examples are H?lderlin’s (1770–1843) late ‘insane’ poems or Paul Valéry’s (1871–1945) Cahiers (笔记本), and even more a number of Surrealist writings—altogether putting the concept of ‘work’ fundamentally in question.
It is quite logical that such a situation also fundamentally questioned concepts such as an ultimately ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic text’. As a consequence, establishing a text with claims of ‘authoritiy’ had to be abandoned, according to several experts of manuscripts. This is where manuscript studies in the ‘West’ split into basically three different schools, roughly in the 1970s. There is, roughly, a (1) German-Italian school that insists on leaving ‘readings’ open and that they are marked and commented in an edition; a (2) Anglo-Saxon school, basically aiming at producing a readable, but therefore still authoritative text (which is manifest in the Taiwanese term suggesting the possibility of an ‘ultimate’ text, 编订本); and finally (3) the French School, namely the critique génétique 文本生成学 that insists on the process on the one hand, but also excels in the purely aesthetic appreciation of manuscripts as artefacts—where spatial considerations dominate to the extent that chronological considerations (in contradiction to the conceptual label) are disappearing altogether.
What can and has to be done to root manuscript studies 手稿研究 more firmly as an accepted discipline with its own methods within the field modern Chinese literature? After the pioneering efforts of 王锡荣 in the early 1990s, several approaches have been undertaken, particularly in the last decade. Their merits notwithstanding, they do, however, lack in sensibility towards the fact that recent developments in non-Chinese manuscript research are marked by various different schools with their respectively different terminology, especially where the status of a particular single hand-written witness 手稿文证 in the whole creative process is concerned. Despite a number of translation efforts, it seems that in many cases the translators are not familiar at all 业外 with manuscript studies, and therefore contribute to terminologal confusion. A sad example is Pierre-Marc de Biasi’s La Génétique des textes (2000; 《文本发生学》，汪秀华译，2005年). It is evident that a sound terminology is a first-grade prerequisite for a scholarly discipline. In this respect I may point to a similar situation when literature was being established in the 1980s. One important publication that almost went unnoticed because it was not officially printed is 李达三、乐黛云、刘纪惠（合编），《英中文学语汇（微求意见本）》，香港中文大学1991年; with its later child 尹建民，《比较文学术语汇释》，2011年， may serve as a model, also because it not only gives ‘pragmatic’ hints to various approaches or ‘schools’, but also to different established usage in Taiwan and Hong Kong. It may well serve as model for a similar undertaking in manuscript research to make it ‘manuscriptology’ (手稿学).
An important aspect in the study of manuscripts is their accessibility. Also due to their legal status as 文物，it is more frequently difficult than not. However, the increasing number of facsimile editions not only of modern wrtiers’ manuscripts over the past two decades has partly relieved this situation. Yet in turn, these very facsimiles, in addition often not printed for publication, also reveal another problem: Their very presentation, e.g. with historicizing 线装, indicates an interest in manuscripts as calligraphies, rather than as sources for texts or as witnesses for a text’s complicated elaboration. As a consequence, the reproduction quality is often poor (《钱钟书手稿集》，3册，2003年), or it literally distorts the manuscript’s physical qualities by skipping single sheets’ margins or even producing another one the original never has had (茅盾，《子夜手迹本》，1996年).
Should not go unmentioned the exchange activities initiated by 王锡荣 （上海交大，原上海鲁迅纪念馆） and 易鹏（台北中大） that have resulted in a number of conferences with international participation (参阅《???》，王锡荣编，2016年；《开始的开始》，易鹏编，2010年). Moreover, the establishment of the 现代文献手稿研究中心 at 上海交通大学 two years ago by 王锡荣 has created an excellent institutional framework for continuing to tackle all the issues sketched above. This institution, together with the 上海鲁迅纪念馆, is now organizing the 第三届中国现代作家手稿及文献国际研讨会 to held 九月中旬. It is my firm belief that this will be the next step towards 手稿学. But I also believe that the most convincing way to establish 手稿学 are examples, that is 评订本 of exemplary modern text that display the whole range of potential of this newly emerging discipline to elucidate writers’ creative process, not only to a scholarly audience, but also to a broader readership.
（课题组供稿）&苍产蝉辫;
