The Many Lives of Yang Luchan: Mythopoesis, Media, and the Martial Imagination

D. Wile
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Abstract

The life of Yang Luchan, patriarch of the Yang lineage and founder of taijiquan’s most popular style, is a biographical blank slate upon which conservative, progressive, orientalist, and just plain rice bowl interests have inscribed wildly divergent narratives. Conservative scholar-disciples sought to link him with the invented Wudang-Daoist lineage, while progressives emphasized his humble origins and health benefits of the practice. His life (c.1799-1872) straddled the height of the Manchu empire and decline into semi-colonial spheres of foreign influence, while successive generations of Yang descendants propagated his ‘intangible cultural heritage’ through Republican, Communist, ‘open’ and global eras. Practiced world-wide by hundreds of millions, taijiquan’s name recognition made it ripe for media appropriation, and Yang Luchan has been remythologized in countless novels, cartoons, television series, and full-length feature films. The case of Yang Luchan offers an unusual opportunity to witness an ongoing process of mythopoesis against a background of historical antecedents and to compare these narratives with traditional Chinese warrior heroes and Western models of mythology and heroology. If the lack of facts has not constrained the fabrication of invented biographies, neither should it discourage the quest for historical context as we sift and winnow truth from trope in examining the patterns of motivated reasoning that characterize the many reconstructions of Yang’s biography.
杨庐禅的多世:神话、媒介与武侠想象
杨氏宗师、最受欢迎的太极拳创始人杨禄禅的一生就像一张白纸,保守的、进步的、东方的和普通老百姓的兴趣在上面写下了截然不同的叙述。保守的学者弟子试图将他与武当道教联系起来,而进步人士则强调他的卑微出身和修行对健康的好处。他的一生(约1799年至1872年)经历了满清帝国的鼎盛和半殖民地的衰落,而杨氏后代则在共和、共产、开放和全球化的各个时代传播他的“非物质文化遗产”。全世界有数亿人练习太极拳,太极拳的知名度使其成为媒体盗用的时机成熟,杨禄禅在无数小说、漫画、电视剧和长篇故事片中被重新神话化。杨禄婵的案例提供了一个不同寻常的机会,让我们在历史背景下见证神话创作的持续过程,并将这些叙事与中国传统的战士英雄和西方的神话和英雄学模式进行比较。如果缺乏事实并没有限制虚构传记的编造,那么它也不应该阻碍我们对历史背景的追求,因为我们在检查杨氏传记的许多重建特征的动机推理模式时,从修辞中筛选和筛选真相。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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