by Pu Songling
Pu also condemns abuse of power and authority by localizing the consequences of such acts in the physical experience of the offending individuals. Michel Foucault notes that social control is conducted not only “through consciousness or ideology, but also in the body and with the body,” for of subjective experiences, “the biological is most important, the biological, the somatic, the corporeal” (66). After a district magistrate has a sesame oil merchant beaten to death in a pique of anger over a minor legal violation in “The Home Wrecker” (chai lou ren), he’s punished with the birth of a dissolute son who makes the magistrate’s life a physical torment, while Pu warns at the end, “For anyone who’s in a position of authority over other people, it’s never too soon to begin acting with caution!” He similarly castigates the title character of “Wei Gongzi,” who poisons the daughter he sired by seducing a maidservant, depicting Wei as “a villain and a beast” who is punished by succumbing to a debilitating disease; amidst his suffering, Wei finally acknowledges his debauched deeds, pounding his chest while confessing his evil.3
Recognizing pragmatically (though with a palpable degree of indignation) that wrongdoing by powerful individuals often goes unpunished, Pu also uses his tales’ focus on the weird and the anomalous to provide a form of vicarious retribution for the wickedness of his characters. In the commentary at the end of “Wang Shi,” the author reveals how sanctioned salt merchants swindle people by jacking up prices and then extorting money from them through salt tax “inspectors” who beat and shackle the people—it’s legal for smugglers “to sell the local salt to other towns,” explains Pu, but illegal for the locals “to buy it from [the other towns]—such an injustice!” The main story takes a supernatural revenge on such merchants when they’re dragooned to join other malefactors in digging the silt out of the Nai River in the underworld; Pu also includes a secondary tale that praises Zichuan county magistrate Zhang Shinian for not tolerating similar abuses from merchants. A rare stone owned by a man named Xing is coveted by a number of corrupt officials in “Shi Qingzu,” leading to Xing being falsely imprisoned; but inevitably, as Pu reiterates strongly in his addendum to the story, the stone “proved to be particularly troublesome” for the offending officials, thanks to the personified spirit of the stone, who appears in dreams as a man named Shi Qingzu.
The very fact of Pu’s impulse to insert moral judgments into his tales that promote “the universal or objective moral norms inherent in the public good” identifies him as one of those individuals who “fight for peace and civil liberties because they are good in and of themselves” (Gross 109). And while the scholars in Pu’s tales are often “the victims of their cruel, corrupt, and horrifying superiors” (Chang and Chang 119), they are sometimes also singled out for criticism—most specifically when they abuse the talents they possess. A scholar with a minor official post in “The Scribe of Epistolary Communications” (si zhashi) is punished for giving sarcastically clever though demeaning new nicknames to his wives and concubines: when he kills the titular scribe in anger for using the womens’ old nicknames instead of their new, derogatory ones, the scribe’s ghost shames and mocks him with a calling card that constructs a message out of the women’s old nicknames. The title character of “Scholar Zhou” (zhou sheng) composes some irreverent verse with gay overtones about county magistrate Xu, then dies mysteriously as a result; the reader is shocked, however, to discover that Xu’s wife (who also read the poem) and Zhou’s servants (to whom he handed the manuscript), though innocent parties, also die. Pu exploits this twist rhetorically in the cautionary message to scholars within his concluding comments: “Indulging in whatever one wishes to write always results in producing a high volume of words quickly, but such writing often produces unpredictable results.” When you encounter the aptly-titled “Retribution” (guobao), you’ll understand just how serious a crime Pu considered scholarly abuse of talent to be, for the recklessly mischievous scholar of that story, articulate and skilled in fortune-telling, lies to people about their fate; the penalties he suffers are horrible indeed.4
Pu also employs his position as “collector” rather than as author to praise the goodness and dedication of contemporaries and of historical luminaries without seeming obsequious. “The Hail God” (bao shen) concludes with praise for the narrative’s protagonist, court historian Tang Jiwu, who modeled “a righteous path, and heaven had already watched him in admiration for quite some time, which is why the hail god showed any respect for the gentleman’s fame” (compare the respect for dedication similarly expressed towards magistrate Shi in “The Xinzheng Dispute” [xinzheng song]). Provincial governor Zhu Huiyin is praised for doggedly solving a series of murders in Guangdong in “The Boatmen of Laolong” (laolong chuanhu), with some otherworldly aid: “When governor Zhu took up his post, spirits responded to his inquiry, so the unpunished dark deeds were brought to light.” A dignified fox spirit identifies the vice magistrate in Jinan as only one out of seventy officials who might be considered worthy of his title in “A Junior Official” (yi yuan guan). Describing the vice magistrate as “an upright man who couldn’t be swayed by flattery,” Pu reveals that he was adjudicating in a pervasively corrupt atmosphere: “At that time there were plenty of objectionable practices and corruption was common, and public money was being embezzled, but the high officials were always protected from prosecution, the spoils of their graft shared out among their subordinates, so no one dared to accuse them.” This is the prudent indictment of an atmosphere of corruption, a historical lesson rather than a direct accusation; the author has slandered no specific official and hence cannot be accused of envy or sedition.
While some individuals deciding to undertake political activism are significantly influenced by the opinions of people they trust and respect, for others “these opinions are irrelevant,” reflecting the “degree of autonomous decision making and social independence” (Gross 123) of the individual activist. Even if Pu Songling limited the dissemination of his weird and anomalous narratives during his lifetime to the same “men from all four corners of China who share my enthusiasm for the unusual” (1:2), he risked compromising his shielded position as “the collector of these strange tales” by sometimes resorting to open criticism. Thus he censures a public administrator named Lang for improperly using his influence in “The Bookworm” (shuchi) and celebrates the fact that the man was forced to return a concubine he had illegally taken from her original household. In the addendum to “Wang Da,” Pu declares that injustice is largely due to “officials who overreact in response to wrongs” or who are “basically servants of the powerful families,” as was often the case in earlier historical periods. He’s simply working to forestall patterns of behavior that will only worsen over time: to conclude “Zeng Youyu” he flatly states, “As the ancients said: if the father steals, the son will certainly become a thief, for that’s how corruption works.”
His private papers indicate that Pu Songling had finished the majority of his stories in this collection by the age of 40. Yet they remained unpublished until 1740, when a group of individuals that included his grandson, Pu Lide (1683-1751), advocated for their publication (though the earliest surviving publication of the text is dated 1766). This grandson wrote that while some readers might dismiss a tale from the collection simply as a popular ghost story, anyone who reads discerningly “will say that it uses the supernatural to demonstrate rewards and punishments” (Zeitlin 26). Indeed, it has done so for an increasingly wide audience in the centuries since the death of the “collector of these strange tales.”
Notes
1 See the discussions of this point in the preceding volumes (1:xii-xiii; 2:xii-xiii; 3:xvi).
2 Guan Yu, the Three Kingdoms hero who was deified, after his death, as Guandi or Guangong (see Sondergard and Collins 50-73), was reputed to be a learned man and devoted reader—so he tests Guo, and looking over what the official has written, exclaims, “This is spelled incorrectly, and the characters aren’t even drawn accurat
ely! This is some kind of wealthy cheater, unworthy of assuming an official’s office!”
A very different take on bribery/coercion is displayed in “Another Frog God Tale” ([qingwa shen] you), as the title’s deity extorts money from rich merchant Zhou, explaining, “I didn’t take from you according to whether you were poor or rich, whether you had money to spare or didn’t . . . but determined the amount that guilt could force you to give.” And merchant Zhou, as you’ll see, has a great deal of guilt to motivate him.
3 A different form of somatic or embodied punishment is humiliation, which is of sufficient experiential potency that Pu shows it triggering effects from suicide to psychological deterioration. In “The Owl” (xiaoniao), an administrator of military operations abuses his power, forcing peasants to let him use their private animals; this clever graduate of the imperial academy is challenged for his actions by three righteous territorial magistrates, but he outtalks them with a drinking game—till he’s defeated at it by a young man who afterwards changes into an owl, not only embarrassing him in front of the magistrates, but demonstrating that higher powers have seen through his bravado.
4 Stories of this sort are similar to what Rachel E. Stern and Jonathan Hassid call control parables, stories “about transgression that counsel caution and restrict political possibilities,” didactic narratives that “invent or recapitulate an understanding of why certain types of action are dangerous or even impossible,” allowing audiences to “speculate about the hidden reasons for retribution” (1240). The difference, of course, is that Pu Songling is pointing out that the actions of his corrupt characters are egregiously immoral and inappropriate, rather than merely “dangerous.”
II. Discreet Managers and Problem Solvers: Pu’s Wife (and Husband) Lessons
An intriguing measure of the scholarly knowledge embedded in Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from Liaozhai is reflected in the remarkable female characters, both human and supernatural, appearing in them. Scholars of our own period have begun to recognize the significance of a canon of feminist texts that either complement or extend the lessons of Confucian tradition, so Pu’s creation of a range of strong female characters makes him seem both a feminist popularizer and a scholar versed in the wider tradition of Confucianist literature. There were four central texts in the feminist-Confucianist canon by Pu Songling’s time (the four were published together in 1624), written by women for female readers. Han dynasty author Ban Zhao (c. 45-116 C.E.) wrote the Admonitions for Women (女誡 nü jie) in order to emphasize principles that guide a woman as she creates harmony within the household. Tang dynasty sisters Song Ruoxin (d. 820?) and Song Ruozhao (d. 825) created the Analects for Women (女論語nü yunlu), replacing the central voice and character of Confucius from his own Analects with that of Ban Zhao as she outlines modes of conduct, specific domestic responsibilities (including household management), and advocates a canny sense of guardedness and vigilance. The wife of the Ming dynasty emperor Chengzu, empress Xu (1362-1407), in 1404 wrote the Domestic Lessons (內訓 neixun), expanding the cautionary precepts of its predecessors into twenty sections. The Concise Selection of Exemplary Women (女範节录 nüfan jielu) written by Liu, the widowed mother of late Ming Confucianist Wang Xiang, challenges the perspective that women are less intelligent (and hence less educable) than men by citing dynamic historical examples of female intellectuals “from all walks of life,” demonstrating that they were uniformly “learned as well as virtuous” (Li-hsiang 109).
Even male authors like Luo Rufang (1515-88) began to participate in the reorientation of traditional female values, for example emphasizing maternal nurturing (慈 ci) over chastity, thereby elevating “motherly love to the same level as filial piety and brotherly respect” (Judge 109), creating avenues by which women could prove themselves just as noble and innovative as men. In stories like “The Zhang Family Woman” (zhang shi fu), Pu effectively combines the canny counsel of the feminist-Confucian texts with the positions of texts arguing the importance of women’s work and values, forging a uniquely resourceful protagonist capable of dealing with the daunting realities associated with dynastic change. When marauding Mongolian soldiers, technically under the command of traitors to the Ming dynasty like General Wu Sangui, begin openly raping any women they encounter, only a woman from the Zhang family “didn’t try to hide, brazenly choosing instead to stay in her own home.” As one of her home defense tactics, the woman invites the soldiers inside one at a time, tricking them into falling into a pit she’s concealed beneath her bed’s blankets, where she disposes of them. To Pu, she exemplifies both cleverness and integrity: “This worthy woman should be celebrated for her intelligence and her ability to keep herself chaste!”
The challenge for the resourceful woman in Pu’s tales is to continue to cultivate herself and her talents without drawing attention to herself, to avoid putting the harmony of the household at risk. In addition, she’s to follow the 妇道 (fudao), the Confucian “wifely way,” by placing her family’s needs before her own in order to aid her husband in becoming successful and hence in gaining glory for the family, by honoring the family’s ancestors with regular sacrifices, by serving and obeying her husband’s parents, and by extending the family bloodline through childbearing (De Bary 411). While men and women shared the domestic duties of child-rearing, caring for family elders, and promoting good relations between branches of the family, women had exclusive responsibility for culinary labor such as wine-making and cooking, for the practical end of childcare and eldercare (performing the “filial duty of taking care of elderly parents on behalf of the men” [Du and Cai 11]), and for weaving silk from silkworms. Women “not only engaged in various handicrafts and such work as picking mulberry and tea leaves, gathering firewood, herding cattle and sheep, tending to domestic fowl, and raising hogs, but also rose early to cook breakfast for the whole family,” then in the evenings “did the dishes, darned socks, made cloth shoes, and performed many other chores” (Li 105-6).
Liu writes in the Concise Selection of Exemplary Women that even with all of these demands made upon a woman’s time, she still needs to be educated; for when women are “illiterate, they tend to overlook the rites,” and hence are “neither learned nor virtuous.” Only when educated, she argued, could women “be proper in their conduct” (Li-hsiang 109). The circumscribed household rites that she’s referencing were the natural concomitants to the very process by which a woman became a wife. Established during the Zhou dynasty (eleventh century B.C.E. to 256 B.C.E.), The Rites of Zhou explains that there are six rituals, or etiquettes, that must be followed for a marriage to be considered legitimate and decorous: a go-between or matchmaker draws up a contract between two families; gifts are presented to the family of the bride; the birth dates and names of the two proposed partners are subjected to divination, to analyze the couple’s compatibility; an auspicious date for the joining is selected; the bride’s family members are advised of the proposed date, to secure their approval; and the bride is conveyed to the groom’s home for the marriage to be consummated (Bates177).
As domestic manager and labor supervisor, the wife carried the burden of monitoring and facilitating household operations while also performing a significant portion of manual labor.1 Pu’s tales concede that this is an onerous responsibility—and sometimes too much for the woman running the household. Shiniang, daughter of the frog god, marries mortal Xue Kunsheng (in “The Frog God” [qingwa shen]), yet doesn’t perform all of the requisite women’s work (suggesting that she simply can’t attend to it all), obliging Xue’s mother to take care of mending his clothes and shoes. When Xue complains at the frog god’s temple (“You raised a daughter who can’t tend to her parents-in-law”), the deity rewards Xue with a new home and a fully-compliant Shiniang. Scholar Deng, who’s been away from his wife, Lou, for over a year, has a baby with the title character of “Fang Wenshu” (since Deng and Lou haven’t been able to conceive any children). Fang arranges to leave the baby with Lou as though he’
s her own child and gives her “medicine” that causes breast milk to flow so Lou can feed the infant. While Lou is overjoyed to have a child, Pu has her pragmatically realize “that she wouldn’t be able to do manual work and care for him at the same time, which became increasingly worrisome.” Even in the midst of the details that make his stories “strange,” the author acknowledges the very real obligations in the domestic sphere that his culture has relegated to women.
He also makes clear that that hierarchy which elevates the wife above any concubines acquired by the husband is a matter of organizational practice, not of moral superiority.2 He Zhaorong, a favored concubine, gives birth to a son (the title character of “Danan”), but is forced out by of the home by cruel wife Shen when her husband, Xi, is away.3 Zhaorong refuses to remarry (and even slashes her abdomen deeply to enforce her intention), but finally agrees to serve a man who needs a woman to do his sewing and sundries—and who turns out to be Xi. Because of the physical and psychological trauma she’s endured, Zhaorong becomes prone to illness, unable to perform manual labor in the home, recommending that Xi acquire a concubine for that purpose. Ironically, that concubine turns out to be Shen; she refuses to serve Zhaorong “as the mistress of the house,” and “instead took care of manual labor in the household” as the family ends up living in amity.