by Steven Moore
The narrative proper gets underway in chapter 2. We’re introduced to a Buddhist monk named Lone Peak, and are told enough about him that we assume he will be the protagonist of the novel, though in fact he’s a minor character who disappears at the end of the chapter and won’t be seen again until the novel’s conclusion – a “rejection of conventional practice” proudly noted in the critique to chapter 2. The old monk receives a visit from a handsome young man who is the true protagonist of the novel, Weiyang Sheng, a nickname referring to his favorite time for amorous pursuits: the Before Midnight Scholar. (So he was called in the first English translation by Richard Martin [1963], but its second translator Patrick Hanan gives him the jarring Latin name Vesperus.) He has come to discuss Zen subtleties with the monk, who spots him for a lecher and tries to persuade him to renounce the world and take up the religious life. But Vesperus wants to worship on the carnal prayer mat of women’s bodies, not on a religious one of straw. Determined to become a great poet and to marry the most beautiful girl in the world, Vesperus ignores the monk’s warning that even if he finds and marries such a girl, he’s bound to see someone even more beautiful and be tempted to commit adultery, which will lead someone to seduce his wife in retribution, to the misery of all concerned. And this is exactly what happens, though with many clever twists and turns.
Vesperus marries the most beautiful girl in town, Jade Scent, the only daughter of a puritanical Confucian nicknamed Iron Door. Though attractive, 15-year-old Scent is sexually ignorant and has to be tutored by our scholar, who brings her erotic picture books and novels like The Embroidered Couch.24 Scent is a quick study, but Vesperus tires of his oppressive father-in-law and wants to seek out further erotic experiences, so he leaves under the pretense of furthering his academic studies. At another town he falls in with a master criminal who agrees to help Vesperus find potential adulteresses— unlike in the European novel, experienced women, not virgins, are the libertine’s target—but first there is a little matter to attend to. Turns out Vesperus is woefully underendowed, so he finds a Daoist who surgically extends his penis with that of a dog. In his critique to this chapter, Li hastens to warn any copycats among his readers: “The surgical implant of a dog’s member into a human being, as related in this chapter, is a palpable absurdity, which implies that Vesperus’s actions are going to be bestial in nature” (8).
Straining at the leash, Vesperus first seduces a woman named Fragrance, married to the struggling silk merchant Honest Quan, who will eventually seduce Vesperus’s wife Scent (note the similar names) in revenge and sell her into prostitution. Then Vesperus gets involved with three cousins and their aunt, both singly and together in a climactic orgy. (At no point does the author blame Vesperus’s lovers for ruining him, or treat them as victims. As one of them says, “There’s no sightseeing or visiting for us, as there is for men. Sex is the one diversion we have in our lives, and surely no one can tell us not to enjoy that!” [9].) Worn out, he seeks out a wonder-working prostitute he’s heard of from the sisters’ returning husbands (who have enjoyed her ministrations), and discovers to his horror that it’s his wife Jade Scent. She hangs herself in shame—if this comic novel had room for a tragic heroine, she would be it—and after a public humiliation Vesperus makes his way back to the Buddhist retreat of Lone Peak, who has recently acquired a new disciple: none other than guilt-ridden Honest Quan. Vesperus devotes himself to the religious life, though he still has carnal urges. (Li casually notes most clergy deal with these urges either by masturbating or by buggering their young disciples.) One night Vesperus has an erotic dream about his former mistresses but is awakened by a barking dog—a reminder that he has not yet shed his bestial nature. He then to decides to cut off his canine-enhanced penis, and only then does he find peace of mind.
I doubt the novel’s extensive sex scenes convinced many readers to avoid adultery, and I doubt Li Yu expected them to. While he may have been sincere in recommending (as he does in chapter 1) that a man satisfy himself with his own wives and concubines and not seduce those of other men, his mocking tone throughout suggests the only thing he was sincere about was aesthetic pleasure. In his critiques, Li notes the subtlety of the novel’s structure, his innovative blending of expository discourse with narrative, and the deliberate deceptions he plays on readers to keep them on their toes and to remind them of his ingenuity. The prose itself is playful and witty: as in the title, Li is fond of describing sex in terms of religion, politics, war, or the Chinese examination system, mocking them all (and/or elevating sex) in the process. He often applies quotations from the classics to ribald situations, and will use a Confucian concept like the Doctrine of the Mean to describe routine sex. Although he pays lip-service to the Buddhist notion of karmic retribution, Li was solely interested in poetic (not divine) justice, of putting his characters through a mazy plot and assigning them aesthetically appropriate ends. Li was bold enough to make his protagonist an antihero, just as he was the first to make a clown the male lead in a play.25 More than any other Chinese novel before it, The Carnal Prayer Mat strikes the reader as a constructed work of art, rather than a twice-told tale based on historical materials. Why does Vesperus get involved with three cousins? As the aunt explains (speaking for the author), “There’s not a single stroke in any of the characters he invented that does not have its meaning. For instance, the character jian in jianyin [adultery] is composed of three nü [woman] characters. Since you three are living together and committing adultery, you must surely appreciate the brilliance of the invention!” Any sophisticated reader must surely appreciate the brilliance of Li Yu’s invention.
In his unsentimental attitude toward sex, Li Yu was mocking a popular fiction genre of his time, the “scholar–beauty romance” (caizi jiaren xiaoshuo). These short novels typically feature an upright student and an even uprighter teenage girl, both moral paragons with emblematic names, who are made for each other but first must undergo a novel’s worth of complications and misunderstandings before the inevitable wedding at the end. Unlike ancient Greek romances, these complications usually don’t entail anything as adventurous as pirate abductions or enforced slavery, but instead revolve around social niceties concerning reputation and the regulations in the Confucian Book of Rites (Liji). Nearly 50 of them survive from the period of roughly 1650 to 1750.
The best and most famous example is the first Chinese novel to be translated into a European language, The Fortunate Union (Haoqiu zhuan; W–G Hao-ch’iu chuan), composed sometime in the middle of the 17th century by the pseudonymous Mingjiaozhongren (A Follower of Orthodox Confucianism). Deftly structured, the novel’s first two chapters are devoted to the chivalrous T’ieh Chung-yu (Jade within Iron), a wandering student-poet who rescues a fellow student’s fiancée from abduction, and the second two chapters to virtuous Shui Ping-hsin (Water Ice Heart), a Shandong beauty kept busy outwitting the advances of a local playboy named Kuo Ch’i-tsu (Disgrace to His Ancestors) while her father is in exile. Her cleverness at spoiling Kuo’s schemes is matched by Jade’s bravery: he rescues her from a sticky situation, and after Kuo poisons him, Ice Heart sneaks him back to her home to nurse him back to health. Because they are single they violate Confucian morality by keeping company, but both agree that in this particular case they can be excused from strict propriety. They remain chaste during this interlude—jade and ice are Chinese symbols of purity—but they worry what others will think and thus keep their distance after Jade’s recovery, daring not to profess the love they already have for each other. The remainder of the novel concerns Kuo’s continuing attempts to marry Ice and ruin Jade, but thanks to their unbending adherence to proper form, they triumph and are eventually married, partly thanks to the intervention at the end of the student Jade had helped at the beginning of the novel.
What saves this sentimental, didactic tale from tedium and gives The Fortunate Union its charm are several humorous scenes, some beautiful poetry, and the fact the two leads are not humorless prigs. Jade occasi
onally gets drunk and has a temper, and clever Ice has a smart mouth. They recognize each other as superior beings and thus feel justified in defying public opinion during Jade’s illness; sounding like a Nietzschean supergirl, Ice haughtily tells her uncle, “the Sage [Confucius] drew up the Rites for the observance of inferior people, not to bind those of higher worth. For the latter, there are Rites beyond the Rites! When Mencius forbade direct meeting between man and woman, he did not seek to establish this as a great crime, but only as an infraction of the lesser rules of courtesy. People with correct hearts have no need of the lesser rules. Those of great virtue can do things impossible to people of no character.”26 But once the crisis is over, these two correct hearts become slaves to the Rites and don’t play the “higher worth” card. Even after they marry they delay consummating their union until they demolish every lingering suspicion that anything improper went on while Ice played nurse to Jade. (Ice even submits herself to examinations by three matrons to validate her virginity.) Though one wishes these superior beings could see through the idiocy of their Confucian code—which resembles Islamic fundamentalism regarding relations between the sexes—but given the cultural context, Jade and Ice play their parts well. Mingjiaozhongren is a master of narrative foreplay and strings the reader along just far enough before consummating this fortunate union. In 1761 Thomas Percy published a heavily annotated adaptation of The Fortunate Union (too loose to be called a translation) called Hau Kiou Choann, or The Pleasing History, which was quickly translated into French, German, and Dutch. (John Francis Davis’s more accurate English translation appeared in 1829.) Goethe read the German translation and liked it; he was reminded of the novels of Samuel Richardson and of his own verse-novel Hermann and Dorothea (1797).
Other novels in this genre feature two pairs of scholars and beauties, or a romantic triangle: in the only other example to be translated into English, The Two Fair Cousins (Yu Jiao Li [the names of the three principal characters], c. 1660?), ascribed to Tianhua Zhang Zhuren, the scholar gets to marry two cousins, but only after following the prescribed rules. “While Yu Jiao Li allows some bending of the rules,” Margaret Wan observes, “such as the heroine dressing as her ‘brother’ to offer her own hand to a handsome scholar, the villains are those who violate social conventions by selfishly trying to persuade engaged persons to marry someone else. They relentlessly target the scholar and beauty, who do what they must to avoid these unwelcome matches” (62). This too was admired by Goethe, as well as by Stendhal, Carlyle, Emerson, and Thoreau. It’s a shame, however, that these two romances were the first Chinese novels to be translated into Western languages; had any doughty translator introduced one of the four Ming masterpieces—not to mention The Tower of Myriad Mirrors or The Carnal Prayer Mat—Western audiences would have been astounded, its novelists humbled. Instead, translators and publishers chose safe, familiar fare. There are dozens of other Chinese romances like these, but they sound too formulaic and conventional to warrant further attention.27
Situated between these G-rated romances and Li Yu’s X-rated parody of them is the domestic realism of Marriage as Retribution, aka The Bonds of Matrimony (Xingshi yinyuan zhuan, literally “A Marriage Fate to Rouse the World”), another 100-chapter meganovel of which, unfortunately, only the first 20 chapters have been translated into English.28 Nothing is known of the pseudonymous author Xizhou Sheng—for a while the novel was wrongly attributed to Pu Songling, author of the famous Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, who more likely was influenced by it—only that his pen name (meaning Scholar of the Western Chou) indicates he preferred the golden age of Confucius to his own. He apparently began the long novel at the end of the Ming Dynasty and published it some 20 years later, in or around 1661.
Like other Chinese historical novels, Marriage as Retribution is a scathing attack on the author’s own time projected back onto an earlier era, in this case the middle of the 15th century. As Tolstoy would do centuries later in The Kreutzer Sonata, Xizhou Sheng focuses on the institution of marriage as a warning sign of the times: the bulk of the novel concerns a henpecked husband whose inability (or unwillingness) to tame his shrew is symptomatic of society’s ills. Through historical parallels—China fended off a Manchu invasion in 1449—the author implies his country fell to the invading Manchus in 1644 because of this inversion of the Confucian social hierarchy, in which women dominated men and womanish eunuchs dominated the emperor. Though harsh, the novel’s purpose is to reform society through ameliorative satire: “tough love” fiction.
The first part of the novel (chaps. 1–22), a kind of lengthy prologue to the rest, concerns the Chou family. The patriarch, Chao Sixiao, is a mediocre schoolteacher who bribes and fakes his way into a lucrative government job, only to be deprived of his office eventually for embezzlement. His son, Chao Yuan, is an arrogant dolt who burns through his father’s money, neglects his bad-tempered wife Ji (she was the husband and Yuan the shrewish wife in a previous lifetime), and takes an actress/prostitute named Zhen’ge as his concubine. Out hunting one day with her, he comes upon a seductive woman in white who turns out to be a fox spirit, which Yuan shoots and kills with an arrow. The 1,000-year old vixen takes revenge: first she causes him to fall ill, and then curses him to be reincarnated as the most henpecked husband in literature. After 10 more hellraising years, during which Yuan drives his wife to suicide and robs his father’s benefactors, he is caught in bed with the wife of a cobbler named Little Raven; the cuckolded husband first cuts off her head:
Ch’ao Yüan screamed for help a few times, and then Little Ya sliced off his head. Little Ya tied the two heads together by their hair. He sw[u]ng them over his shoulder, put the knife in his belt as before, picked up his stick and jumped up on the wall. He walked all night to reach the city.
Isn’t it romantic to die for love? (19)
That last remark is typical of the sarcastic author, for whom greed, lust, and self-interest drive his society. With Swiftian disgust at the human race, which he often describes with animal imagery, Xizhou populates his novel with thieves, cons, quacks, pimps, whores, fools, blackmailers, adulterers, incompetents, poisoners, sensual priests, dissolute nuns, disloyal sons, rapacious relatives, thriftless peasants, dishonest shopkeepers, disobedient students, and the ubiquitous crooked officials, with only a few decent characters still committed to traditional Confucian values. One of those few is Yuan’s mother, who lives to the age 103 and provides a link between the first 22 chapters and the 78 that follow concerning the next generation.
Yuan is reincarnated as Xichen, the unremarkable son of Di Zongyu, a rich landowner and another decent character. Shortly after, a girl named Sujie is born to a friend of the Di family, and turns out to be the reincarnation of the fox spirit Yuan killed. In addition, Yuan’s first wife Ji is reincarnated as the daughter of a silversmith; she will eventually become Xichen’s concubine after he marries Sujie, who makes his life a living hell. Sujie goes beyond mere nagging or intimidation to actually torture her husband on several occasions and attempt to kill him, not to mention whipping their servants, disrespecting their relatives (she tries to castrate her father-in-law at one point), setting fire to the house of an enemy, and keeping company with two vicious lesbian nuns. As doltish as Yuan, Xichen puts up with the abuse, especially after he learns that virtually every husband he knows is also henpecked. (Per fox-spirit lore, he is also under her sexual spell; as he tells a fortune-teller who recommends divorce, “But she is so beautiful, and she can be very affectionate with me when we make love, though she changes her attitude right afterwards” [61], trans. Yu.) Sujie is relentless in her abuse until the final chapter, in which she shoots an arrow at her long-suffering husband (just as Yuan shot one at her in chapter 1) and then falls ill while the wounded Xichen has a vision of meeting the king of hell, who tells him he has finally paid off his karmic debt. Sujie then dies, and Xichen lives a long, happy life with his reincarnated first wife/new concubine, tendering her the respect he withheld during th
eir first marriage.
The supernatural elements are merely a traditional frame for a damning portrait of the author’s debased society, depicted in ultra realistic detail that rivals that of The Plum in the Golden Vase, an obvious model. My bare summary leaves out the wealth of incident in the long novel, which has impressed Sinologists for its verisimilitude. In his superb essay on Marriage as Retribution, Andrew H. Plaks gets “the sense of a thoroughgoing realism that is almost cinematographic in detail—notably in its depiction of examination procedures, official administration and courtroom practice, pawnshops and moneylending, buying and renting of property, provincial travel, disaster relief, and especially prison life.”29 Chi-chen Wang notes the many trial scenes furnish “a better idea of how the judicial process worked in traditional China than can be found in the semiofficial compilations of actual court cases,” and agrees with an earlier critic that Marriage as Retribution is “an indispensable source book for the student of the social, economic and institutional history of China in the Ming and Ch’ing dynasties.”30 Consequently, the supernaturalism may seems at odds with the novel’s dirty realism except that Xizhou Sheng makes it clear he’s using it for psychological purposes; though the novel is filled with ghosts, spirit possessions, and dream premonitions, the narrator matter-of-factly explains at one point “The ghosts that Ch’ao Yüan saw were born out of his own guilty heart. They were not real ghosts that came to beat him” (17). The erudite author repeatedly mocks religious and folkloric explanations even as he exploits them for dramatic effect. “Ghosts wax and wane with the state of your conscience,” he notes in the poem at the beginning of chapter 11, and the demon-haunted world his characters inhabit is populated by their guilty consciences, a very modern view. An ethical Confucian, the author holds his characters responsible for their fates; all talk of reincarnation and hauntings is merely metaphoric. Chinese magic realism.