Cinematic Transcendence: On Legendary Quests and Wuxia Cinema

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights; season three, the Hebrew Bible. This spring and summer, in a season titled The Hall of the Monkey King, we’re talking and thinking about Journey to the West, the fantastical Chinese novel full of action and comedy and spiritual adventure.

You can encounter Journey to the West in film, on television, in comic books—it’s a 16th-century novel that lives comfortably in an age of cinema and video games. This episode, then, follows a tangent away from the 16th century and into the movies. We’re talking about heroic quests and martial arts in media centuries after Journey to the West’s publication.

Wuxia cinema, in particular, occupies our attention here. These are films of high drama and martial arts in pre-modern, legendary Chinese settings. Karen Fang, scholar of cinema and literature at the University of Houston, notes “threads of connection” between Journey to the West and wuxia, and connections include the similar presence of a spiritual quest and martial artistry in a mythical-historical world. Still, to be clear: in this installment, we’re going for a walk away from the novel and into the movies. It’s just that we find a few patterns that match those of the Monkey King’s adventures.

Wuxia stories, like the Monkey King’s, draw from dynamics between intense self-cultivation and power struggle. The result is a durable kind of kinetic drama—it’s opened up cinematic possibilities for decades. Karen Fang explains the heart of it all: “The underlying idea in wuxia is this idea that somebody can reach a level of human transcendency—a transcendent power, a transcendent skill—through years of training and dedication, both to physical training, but also spiritual dedication.”

Guests in this episode include Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston—she’s now working on a biography of Disney legend Tyrus Wong; Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast; and Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King.

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