The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik
Page 21
THE NECKLACE
The necklace represents the Emperor, the person upon whom the order of the empire is based. Its eighty-four perfect pearls are his special gift to his favorite daughter. Although scheme may seem strained, the suggestion seems to be that if the theft of the necklace can be assigned to the Princess’s soldier-lover, Col. Kang, then she will break off with him, return to the imperial court, and in time submit to the incestuous desires that rumor attributes to the Emperor. The eunuch who arranged the theft and who hoped to place the stolen necklace in Col. Kang’s possession could then, Dee conjectures, “practically impose his will upon the Emperor!” (16.107). The loss of the necklace thus threatens not only to destroy the Princess’s hopes for romance, it also threatens to subject the Emperor (and thus the empire) to a eunuch (or to a clique of eunuchs). By restoring the necklace, Judge Dee is restoring the natural order: the Princess will enter a fruitful marriage to the honest Colonel; the Emperor will suppress whatever unnatural impulses he might have entertained; and the sterile eunuch drinks poison and dies. The necklace thus signifies worldly power—the power to rule the empire benevolently (by the emperor), or selfishly (by the eunuch); the power to find a right mate, or a wrong one, producing a healthy family or an unhealthy one.
There is, perhaps, an additional symbolism in the hiding place that the cashier, Tai Min, uses to conceal the necklace once he has stolen it under the direction of the eunuch. He covers each pearl with brown gum and replaces the 84 brown beads on his abacus (Tai Min’s abacus must have 12 rods) with the pearls. The imperial necklace is thus reduced to a commercial calculator.
THE CALABASH
The calabash is opposite of the necklace; it signifies emptiness. The brown shell that Tai Min gums onto each pearl is worthless; within the shell is an invaluable pearl. The value of the calabash (a “bottle gourd”) lies solely in its shell. This significance is made explicit when, in Chapter One, Judge Dee first meets Master Gourd. The Taoist Monk appears to be a physical double of Judge Dee, with a similar beard, similar clothes, and a similar calabash hanging from his saddle. Later in the novel, Judge Dee requires only a pair of crutches and a donkey for everyone in Rivertown to mistake him for the familiar monk. There are two differences: Master Gourd’s legs have been crippled, and while Judge Dee uses his calabash to hold water; Master Gourd’s calabash is empty. When Dee asks about the contents of Master Gourd’s calabash, the monk replies, “Emptiness, sir. Just emptiness…. Emptiness is more important than fullness. You may choose the finest clay for making a beautiful jar, but without its emptiness that jar would be of no use” (1.3). This Daoist wisdom has practical consequences. When, in the middle of the novel, the Judge and the monk are attacked by thugs, Judge Dee is amazed by the immobile monk’s ability to parry the thrusts of their attackers’ swords and spears. Master Gourd explains: “I told you I am only an empty shell…. Being empty, my opponent’s fullness flows automatically into me. I become him, so I do exactly as he does. Fencing with me is like fencing with your own reflection in a mirror” (7.48). Judge Dee will adopt this strategy as he works toward the solution to the mysteries that confront him. He “gives up trying to concentrate” (17.109), and practices Master Gourd’s principle: “In order to discover where Tai Min had hidden the necklace, he would have to empty himself, and put himself in the cashier’s place” (17.115). Detectives imagining themselves into the minds of villains in order to solve their cases had already become a staple of the genre, but van Gulik here neatly imbues it with a philosophical aura.
When Judge Dee had been escorted past the levels of security surrounding the Princess in her palace, his sword, Rain Dragon, had been taken away. The calabash becomes the sword’s substitute in this novel. It is the Judge’s canteen; it is his disguise, enabling him to be taken for a medical doctor (carrying his pharmacopeia in the gourd) and, on one occasion, to be taken for Master Gourd; and, of course, it identifies him with the monk himself.
In the novel’s final chapter, Judge Dee meets Master Gourd for the last time, and there is a final surprise. Master Gourd, not the Emperor, is the Princess’s true father. He was once the famous general, Ou-yang Pei-han. He had been wounded in battle, his legs crushed, and held captive by the Tartars for fifteen years. In the meanwhile, his pregnant “sweetheart” had been taken into the imperial harem, had given birth to a girl who was presumed to be the daughter of the Emperor, and had died. He had then chosen to be a vagrant monk.
Confucius
Judge Dee’s discovery that a mystical Daoist principle provides a method for solving mysteries might seem to compromise his staunch Confucianism. But the Judge has always been as willing to admire the virtues of the mystics, Daoist or Buddhist as he is to condemn their excesses. Judge Dee’s intervention in the case serves essentially Confucianist ends: service to the Emperor and establishment of family. And it is the Daoist monk who recognizes that solving daughter’s problem requires the practical investigative skills of a Confucianist magistrate and advises her to call upon Judge Dee. Van Gulik is willing in these late novels to explore a fruitful interplay between the worldly and unworldly outlooks. But, as if to insure there is no doubt about Dee’s fundamental orientation, he has the Judge quote a specific saying from the Analects of Confucius: “our Master Confucius always fished with a rod,… never with a net. He thought the fish ought to be given a sporting chance” (9.61). (The original line in the Waley translation of the Analects VII.26: “The Master fished with a line but not with a net; when fowling he did not air at a roosting bird.”)
Reviews
It was Boucher’s replacement at the New York Times’s “Criminals At Large” column who greeted this first novel of van Gulik’s third series, Necklace and Calabash, with an unqualified pan: “This is another in the Judge Dee series that takes place in Old China, and it is just as badly written as its predecessors. The judge acts like any tough private eye, using a sword instead of fists and a gun, and Old China just as well might be New Chicago….The drawings are as clumsy as the writing” (Newgate Callendar, “Criminals At Large,” New York Times 16 May 1971: BR 40).
16. Poets and Murder
(28 Chapters)
Scene: Chin-hwa, district neighboring Poo-yang, Judge Dee’s 3rd posting
The Magistrate’s Men: None
The Cast:
Lo Kwan-choong, Magistrate of Chin-hwa (The Chinese Bell Murders, The Red Pavilion, “The Two Beggars”)
Kao Fang, Lo’s assistant; Counsellor of the tribunal
Shao Fan-wen, Doctor of Literature, ex–President of the Imperial Academy
Chang Lan-po, Court Poet
Yoo-lan, famous Poetess
Sexton Loo, Zen monk
Meng Su-chai, tea merchang
Soong I-wen, student
Small Phoenix, dancing girl
Saffron, guardian of the Shrine of the Black Fox
Victims: Soong I-wen, Small Phoenix
Villain’s motive: to conceal prior crimes
Judge Dee is visiting Judge Lo during the Autumn Festival. Three eminent men—Academician Shao, Court Poet Chang, and Sexton Loo—are Lo’s honored guests. The well-known poet Yoo-lan arrives with an armed guard; she is under arrest for having beaten a servant girl to death. Soong I-wen’s body is discovered in his room. He had been quietly investigating the execution, eighteen years earlier, of General Mo Te-ling, who had been accused of conspiring against the Emperor. At a banquet given for Lo’s guests, Small Phoenix is found murdered in her dressing room. Saffron, a half-witted girl who lives alone in a deserted fox shrine, is implicated. Judge Dee begins to outline his explanation of the murders when one suspect suddenly confesses and then, equally abruptly, a second suspect claims the crimes and commits suicide.
Plot
Though it was completed as van Gulik lay dying of lung cancer in a hospital in The Hague, Poets and Murder represents the author at his best. Again the Judge Dee finds himself investigating three deaths: that of the student, Soong I-wen, in his rente
d room at a tea merchant’s; that of the dancer, Small Phoenix, in a dressing room adjacent to the balcony where the Judge and all the principals are watching fireworks; and that of General Mo Te-ling, who was unjustly accused of treason and executed eighteen years earlier. The situations are diverse, but are familiar to readers of the series. Judge Dee has investigated students, merchants, dancers, and generals before; he has encountered corpses discovered in rented back rooms, opportunistic murders in close quarters, and decades old crimes before. Judge Lo makes his fourth and most significant appearance. The later Judge Dee novels have linked together the three crimes they report; in Poets and Murder the linkage is persuasive. (There is a fourth, tangentially related murder—that of Yoo-lan’s maid, which occurred two months prior to the events in Poets and Murder; it too is linked in a way.)
The Poets
Poets and Murder features six poets.
JUDGE DEE
Judge Dee admits he has committed poetry, though only once, and his theme was agriculture: “I tried to compress seasonal directions for the farmers in a hundred rhymed lines” (5.38).
JUDGE LO
Judge Lo shows himself to be a competent magistrate, though he wisely defers to Judge Dee in the investigation of the current murders. In earlier novels, he appeared as a man of sensual appetites; here he appears as an ambitious poet. His principal motive for gathering the four eminent poets—Chang, Shao, Loo, and Yoo—is to receive their helpful criticism and, ideally, praise of his own attempts at poetry.
THE COURT POET
Chang Lan-po, the Court Poet, is, ironically, the least impressive of the major poets. His family connection with Chin-hwa makes him a potential suspect in the murders. And his complaints that he has lived an uneventful life and that consequently his poems lack a “direct link with real life” and “have always been bloodless, devoid of life” make a point about the nature of poetry. His placid life contrasts dramatically with the experiential and emotion vicissitudes of the life of the “poetess,” You-lan. You-lan’s poetry is presented twice in the novel—recited once, and inscribed once; the Court Poet’s poetry is never presented.
THE ACADEMICIAN
Shao Fan-wen, the Academician, is also a poet, though his poetry is never presented either. He appears more as an aesthete, with a high-brow sense of what poetry is, or ought to be. He is, more importantly, another Nietzschean figure along the lines of the monk Sun Ming from The Haunted Monastery. His aesthetic sensibilities lead him not only into the commission of crimes, but into the perverse savoring of the experience of criminal action.
YOU-LAN
In his Postscript, van Gulik claims to have based You-lan on the Tang poet Yü Hsüan-chi (=Yu Xuanji). Yu (c. 844–c. 869–71) is one of the few famous female Chinese poets whose work has been preserved. Forty-nine of her poems are extant. She become the concubine of an official named Li Yi when she was 16; at 19 she became a courtesan, and eventually she dedicated herself as a Daoist nun. She was reported to have had an affair with the poet Wen Tingyun (812–870), to have been promiscuous, and to have been executed for beating her maid (or a novice nun) to death. These details have relevance to the life of van Gulik’s You-lan. You-lan has also had an affair with Wen Tingyun (van Gulik gives his name as Wen Tung-yang), but the Academician Shao was her first and last love. When her name is first introduced, Judge Dee refers to her as “that awful Taoist nun who whipped her maidservant to death” (6.46). As he observes her behavior in the course of the action, his judgment becomes more nuanced. Van Gulik’s assigning You-lan a turn to lesbianism late in her life appears to be his own invention.
The poem that You-lan writes in Chapter XVII is van Gulik’s translation of the first half of a poem by Yu Xuanji.
Bitterly I search for the right words,
For this poem, written under my lamp.
I cannot sleep the long night,
Fearing the lonely coverlets.
In the garden outside
Is the soft rustling of the autumn leaves.
The moon shines forlornly
Through the gauze window panes [27.155].
The lines as translated by David Young:
I’ve racked my brains for a poem chanting here by the lamp
spending a sleepless night away from my chilly quilt
blown leaves fill the courtyard the night wind makes me gloomy
through the cotton curtain and window screen shines
a deep and beautiful moon.
Young gives the title as “Sent to Wen Feiqing on a Winter Night” (“Wen Feiqing” is an alternate name for Wen Tingyun), and includes the final four lines of the poem:
We’re distant and lack leisure time to accomplish our mutual wishes
love rises and falls like a wave and usually leaves our hearts helpless
a sparrow may live alone unable to nest in a parasol tree
I heard one chirping at sunset circling the woods in vain.
Yoo-lan’s nearly masochistic love for Shao may, in the end, strain credibility, but she is otherwise a fine addition to van Gulik’s portraits of strong women
SEXTON LOO
Sexton Loo is the final poet. His poem is a couplet:
We all return to where we came from:
Where the flame went of the doused candle [11.97].
Using a broom-sized writing brush, he inscribes in on a large sheet of paper for Judge Lo to display.
Van Gulik’s death following the composition of Poets and Murder means that Sexton is the last of mystics that van Gulik will set against Judge Dee. If the Daoist Master Gourd in Necklace and Calabash was, physically, a mirror image of the Judge, the Buddhist Sexton Loo is the Judge’s physical antithesis: “toad-like,” obese, unmannered, “swarthy face with … sagging, stubbly cheeks, the fleshy nose above the thick lipped mouth” (1.1). In either case, Judge Dee finds himself paired with a charismatic character who is following a very different path from the Confucian orthodoxy that the Judge has embraced.
The novel opens with the Sexton deciding to join Judge Lo’s Autumn Festival celebration precisely because Judge Dee will be attending, and the novel (and thus the entire Judge Dee saga) ends with the Sexton and the Judge reviewing what has happened. The Sexton, who from the beginning of the novel has been interested in fox lore, attempts to establish a different perspective on the drama by suggesting that the actions of the Academician and Yoo-lan might be seen quite differently from a fox’s point of view. Judge Dee can only say, “You might be right,” and declare himself exhausted. Sexton advises him to rest, and then utters the final words spoken in the Judge Dee novels: “You and I, each in his own chosen direction, have still a long way to go. A very long and weary way” (28.172).
Fox Spirits
Fox spirits (Huli jing) have been present in Chinese folklore since the Han Dynasty, and there is a rich collection of tales about foxes that dates from the Tang dynasty (Kang 14). The fox spirit is capable of transforming itself into human form, especially into an attractive male or female, with the purpose of sexual seduction, though the anthropomorphized spirit is not always malevolent, and can in some tales be a noble figure (Kang 20, 21). The opening chapter of Poets and Murder ends with Sexton Loo opening his soothsayer’s book and reading, “The black fox is setting out from its hole. Take warning” (1.5), and the final chapter closes with the Sexton’s observation on the melodrama of You Lan’s false confession to murder and the Academician’s suicide: “It was quite a drama, Dee. A human drama, where foxes happened to act a part” (28.171).
Judge Lo has a fox shrine in his residence, and Sexton Loo chooses to stay in that courtyard. There is also a Black Fox Shrine in the wasteland near the city’s south gate. Its only caretaker is a half-witted girl, Saffron, who plays a small but significant role in the drama before she dies of rabies contracted from a fox’s bite.
In the end, Judge Loo retreats from the folklore of fox’s changing shapes with humans, and draws a wider conclusion: “We shouldn’t look at everythi
ng from the limited point of view of our small world of man. There are many other worlds, overlapping ours, Dee. From the point of view of the world of foxes, this was a fox drama, where a few human beings happened to act a minor role” (28.171).
Three
From Heathen Chinee to Magistrate Dee: China and the Chinese in American Literature, 1880–1972
The boundaries between highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow literature cannot be, and need not be, precisely defined. The categories generally refer to the class of the audience toward whom a given text is directed; rarely is the class of the author a consideration, though the usual assumption is that while the upper class might possess the facility and the motive (mercenary) to descend to appeal to the lower class, with rare exceptions lowbrow literature has not appealed to the upper class. The literary strata did not begin to matter until widespread literacy and cheap printing in the later 19th century created exploitable constituencies at the extremes: it became profitable (or at least less expensive) to publish recherché poetry and fiction by English and American (and Continental) mandarins for English and American (and Continental) mandarins to consume, and quite profitable to publish formulaic entertainments written by men and women of all brows for the men and women of the lower brows to consume. The upper end of the spectrum appealed to the Modernist taste for irony and erudition; at the lower, the appeal was to sentiment and sensation. The first valued unsettling originality; the second valued originality’s opposite: comfortable variations within familiar conventions. The two extremes became caricatured terms of abuse: the effete highbrow egghead and the calloused lowbrow Neanderthal. And in the middle—scorned by the highbrows as insufficiently enlightened, by the lowbrows as pretentious strivers for status, and by both for clinging to an outdated, genteel morality—there was that majority of the population that saw itself as the quintessence of Americanness. It was morally earnest; it liked its fictions to inform as well as entertain.