The Novel

by Steven Moore

  Marriage as Retribution is a grim novel with flashes of humor, usually at the expense of his stupid characters (Yuan is conned into buying a cat that allegedly meows sutras), and is narrated in an appropriately vulgar tone. (“If Ch’ao Yüan farts,” a character notes, “the old master acts like he’s smelling flowers” [16].) There are no explicit sexual scenes, as in The Plum in the Golden Vase, though there are gagging descriptions of illness and cannibalism. Xizhou’s commitment to realism is valiant; as though responding to the vogue for idealistic scholar–beauty romances—“Here we have a beauty and a genius,” says Dr. Yang, mocking Yuan and his whore (3)—he includes a scene in which a painter offers to create three lifelike portraits of Yuan’s father. “ ‘Nevermind making them look exactly like him,’ said Ch’ao Yüan. ‘Just make him handsome and fair with a nice, long black beard. I want it to look good, not realistic’ ” (18). Xizhou’s portrait of his society isn’t flattering, but it’s realistic. To praise a contemporary novelist for being realistic is nothing, but in the 17th-century it was still an act of daring and innovation. Given the novel’s huge size—exceeded in Chinese fiction, says Wang, “only by the little-known Yeh-sou p’u-yen” (44), which I’ll discuss later—it’s probably unrealistic to expect an unabridged English translation of Marriage as Retribution anytime soon. Maybe in another lifetime.

  Published around the same time (1660) is another novel even more indebted to the great Plum in the Golden Vase. A historian and dramatist named Ding Yaokang (1599–1669) was convinced not only that people were misreading PGV by treating it as pornography rather than a warning against avarice and lust, but that such excesses contributed to the fall of the Ming empire. His 64-chapter Xu Jing Ping Mei (Sequel to The Plum in the Golden Vase) sought to clarify the original’s moral message by dramatizing the karmic retribution visited upon its characters. But because of its association with PGV, Qing officials (who likewise stupidly dismissed the original as porn) threw Ding in jail for four months in 1665 and banned his novel. He then produced a shorter, 48-chapter version that softened his criticisms of the ruling Manchus and jettisoned the earlier version’s many lectures on religion and folk beliefs. Perhaps to fool the censors who judged a book by its title, Ding entitled this version Flower Shadows behind the Curtain (Gelian huaying; W–G Ko-lien hua-ying). Fritz Kuhn published a complete German translation of it in 1956, but the only English translation is an abridged, 33-chapter version that appeared in 1959. Since this was made from Kuhn’s German version, not from the Chinese, it’s so far removed from the 64-chapter original of 1660 that it is indeed like gazing at flower shadows behind a curtain, but it will have to do. Nevertheless, it’s an engaging work, a panoramic view of a society struggling during a time of war.

  In the final chapter of The Plum in the Golden Vase, a priest summons the spirits of the characters who died in the novel and sends them to the Eastern Capital to be reincarnated, a ploy that screams “sequel!” And indeed Scoffing Scholar is said to have written his own sequel to PGV entitled Yu Jiao Li (Jade Charming Plum), which hasn’t survived. A contemporary lucky enough to have read it wrote: “In this novel all the characters in Chin P’ing Mei re-appear and each person receives the just requital of his actions, whether reward or punishment. In the sharpness of his brushwork and the wildness and extravagance of the story and its presentation, Yü Chiao Li if anything surpasses Chin P’ing Mei.”31 Since The Plum in the Golden Vase is one of the greatest novels in world literature, the loss of a sequel that good is a catastrophe. Imagine Don Quixote with no part 2.

  Ding Yaokang knew PGV well (hard to say if he read the sequel) but sometimes gives the characters different fates than those foretold in the older novel, and adjusts the ages of the continuing characters as needed. The main survivors are Hsi-men Ch’ing’s principal wife, the pious Moon Lady (Wu Yüeh-ning), and the child born to them a few hours after her husband’s death in chapter 79 of PGV. Along with her faithful servant Tai Arl (Tai-an)— a much nobler character than his crafty original—the trio wanders through war-torn China trying to avoid the occupying Manchus and local robbers. Their travails, separations, and reunions are spread over the length of the novel and unify the long work, which otherwise consists of episodic accounts of the reincarnations of other characters from PGV.

  Hsi-men, the philandering protagonist of PGV, plays a surprisingly small role in Flower Shadows, merely atoning for his past sins as a blind beggar boy who becomes a monk and dies early in the novel at the age of 19. (He comes back as a ghost near the end). On the other hand, P’an Chin-lien—the sex-addicted Golden Lotus of the original—is reborn as the daughter of a soldier, grows up to develop a lesbian crush on another soldier’s daughter (the reincarnation of her maid Ch’un-mei, who died of sexual excess in the final chapter of PGV), is married off to a loathsome cripple, experiences several heterosexual erotic dreams, then becomes a “stone virgin” physically incapable of vaginal sex, at which point she becomes a nun and is given the name Pure Lotus, the sexual hunger that drove the Golden Lotus of the original smelted away. At the end of this absorbing narrative the author sententiously intones, “And so a child of this world entered into the realm of the eternal, a servant of lust became a virgin of stone” (347).32 Hsi-men’s adulterous sixth wife Ping (the Vase in The Plum in the Golden Vase) is reborn as a China doll named Silver Vase, tricked into becoming a courtesan, then is married to a repulsive slob, seduced and abducted by a smooth operator nicknamed Cash and Carry, and eventually hangs herself by her foot bindings. This sensational, novella-length episode concludes with another accounting of Ding’s moral abacus: “And so her debt of guilt, which she had contracted in her previous existence as Lady Ping, by breaking faith with her husband and by robbing him of his fortune, was thereby paid in full” (182).

  Like Xizhou Sheng, Ding Yaokang was married to the notion of karma and retribution, incapable of believing people might prosper or suffer because of their own actions, or from mere happenstance. Idealizing the world as a cosmic police state (as deeply religious people tend to do), Ding has a character say, “All your deeds, however much you may try to conceal them, are observed and recorded by a Higher Judge. Barely three feet above your heads, invisible spirits are watching everything you do and report everything at once to the Higher Judge” (372), who rewards or punishes them accordingly—if not in this life, then in the next. In his unexpurgated original version, Ding added: “There are also worm-gods that are called Sanshi shen in the midst of a person’s body. They report the person’s sins and mistakes to Heaven periodically.”33 Consequently, the novel runs on retribution, reversion, retaliation, and restoration. Good actions are rewarded, evil ones reprimanded, and separated relations reunited; a former brothel (“flower garden”) is converted to a religious temple, a sexually active woman reverts to a virgin, the Manchus return north and the Chinese emperor is restored to the throne, and Moon Lady eventually returns to her former home where Hsi-men’s wealth is restored to her. It is all a fantasy of how the world should work, of course, but it is not the Heavenly Judge who arranged this novel but Ding Yaokang, playing god to create a world more just than the one he and his readers inhabited. This is why Ding abandons Scoffing Scholar’s rational Confucianism for populist, supernatural versions of Buddhism and Daoism, which, as Kuhn explains in his introduction, “were notably religions of consolation. In critical times, in times of political distress, when the Confucian teachings, upheld by the Throne, the Government and all the machinery of State, threatened to fail and collapse, the people in despair sought sustenance and comfort in belief in another world and in the alluring concepts of withdrawal from the world propounded by Buddhist and Daoist doctrines” (13).

  Despite the novel’s didactic nature and the religious moral tacked on to the end of each episode, Flower Shadows behind the Curtain is a vivid account of what life in China must have been like when the Manchus took over. (Like PGV it is set in the 12th century but obviously reflects the Manchu invasion in the 17th.) Ding
effectively captures the chaos of war and occupation with considerable skill, making up for the novel’s simplistic religiosity. In fact, his treatment religion complicates the novel’s overt commitment to Buddhism and suggests karma and retribution were useful primarily as plot devices. Like other Chinese writers of the time, he often notes that so-called holy men and women were as licentious as anyone, that robbers often disguised themselves as monks, and that religion usually attracts “superstitious peasant women” (48), not the educated. He mocks Buddhist idolatry, especially its costly statues, and questions the Heavenly Judge’s surveillance system, as in these remarks about a burned temple: “The sandalwood statute of Buddha had been wrenched off its pedestal and was also lying on the floor. Only its head was intact, the arms and legs had been hacked off. Alas, why had the divine figure not been able to protect the temple? The grim Veda temple-guards, with their clubs in their fists, had also been powerless to avert the disaster” (210). Near the end of the novel, the hermit Pu Tsing jokes that a charred wooden statue of Buddha should be chopped up for firewood and delivers a short sermon on the history of idolatry, concluding “such likenesses of Buddha are essentially contrary to Buddha and his teaching” (378). Ding’s reverence for religion is most questionable during his comic account of how a former palatial brothel becomes the contested site for three religious sects. Buddhists, Daoists, and Confucians vie for the former “flower garden,” stage garish ceremonies, incomprehensible sermons, and erotic dances, until they compromise and call it the “Hall of the Three Recognised Teachings,” all of which look pretty shabby after Ding puts them through the wringer.

  While it’s true Ding’s digs at religion focus on its superstitious trappings and the hypocrisy of some of its followers, he must have known he was not doing Lord Buddha’s work by writing a novel, which could explain some of these tensions. He notes that one of the 10 mortifications of Buddhism is “Indulge not in singing, dancing, theatre or any other kind of play” (233), which would include both the writing and reading of novels. And while the sex is not as graphic and extensive as in PGV, there’s more of it in Ding’s novel than a truly religious writer would allow. (At one point, Ding retains Scoffing Scholar’s symbolic equation of sex and money: “Poor Hou had been so excited by the proximity of a lovely female shape that his purse had been prematurely emptied of all its gold and he had squandered his slender capital long since” [346].) Ding may have begun writing as a preacher but gave in to the temptations of art and ended up a novelist, and unlike poor Hou had gobs of gold to spend, even if he felt guilty about it afterward. “I have been showing off to the world about the grandeur of my writing,” he wrote, “but there’s none of it that I can take to see Yanluo [the judge of hell] on my final day” (Hu, 93). Access to Ding Yaokang’s complete novel would be necessary to see if he resolved these conflicts between religion, morality, and art, but even the abridged Flower Shadows behind the Curtain deserves to be added to the list of major Chinese novels of the 17th century.

  The remainder of the century saw several more sequels—“snakes’s legs” the critics called them, meaning they were superfluous—more historical novels, and lots more scholar–beauty romances. Paralleling the trend in popular romance novels of our own time, these became less chaste and more sexually explicit over the decades until they became almost indistinguishable from erotica.34 For better or for worse, none of these has been deemed worthy of translation.

  Nor has anyone Englished Nüxian waishi (Unofficial History of a Female Immortal, 1711), a 100-chapter novel by Lü Xiong (1642–1723). An exercise in alternative history, the novel rewrites an early Ming conflict known as the Yongle usurpation (1399–1402), interjecting fantasy and the supernatural into the standard historical account to achieve an outcome more to the author’s liking. (Nüxian waishi is also one of the earliest Chinese novels to have a preface by the author, rather than by an editor or commentator.) The protagonist is a female rebel named Tang Sai’er, a historical figure around whom legends accrued in succeeding centuries. Lü Xiong makes her the “reincarnation of the moon goddess Change and is therefore named Yue jun (Duchess of the Moon) throughout the novel,” writes Altenburger, who goes on to say, “She is supported by several legendary swordswomen and female warriors, who, for their part, have descended from the realm of immortals. . . . She eventually beheads her opponent, the Yongle Emperor, with a flying sword, thus enabling the Jianwen Emperor to resume power. Once she has restored order in the human world, Change alias Sai’er returns to her celestial moon palace” (198–99, ideographs eliminated). A transgressive work, Nüxian waishi contains a devastating critique of neo-Confucian orthodoxy and suggests, according to Altenburger, “that the traditional concept of gender hierarchy does not accord with reality” (203). It caused quite a stir, needless to say, and was later banned.

  Probably impossible to translate is Cao Qujing’s Guwangyan (Preposterous Words, 1730), a 3,000-page sex extravaganza that parodies the conventions of the Chinese shrew narrative, the karmic retribution story, the scholar–beauty romance, and especially pornography, along with some nonfiction forms (biography and travelogue) thrown in, pushing them all to unheard-of extremes. “An encyclopedic collection of sexual acts,” one critic reports, “this novel is fraught with details, among other things, of pederasty, bestiality, sadism, incest, orgies, homosexuality, and transsexuality.”35 The language is equally excessive, reveling in puns, wordplay, and jokes in a determined effort to be as outlandish, frivolous, and obscene as possible. Although it includes one romantic couple devoted to love rather than sex, they are a tiny boat on a raging sea of lust. Like Scoffing Scholar before him, Cao Qujing sought to criticize the immoral excesses of his time by exaggerating them to a grotesque degree, resulting in a work that sounds remarkably similar to the novels of the Marquis de Sade.

  This period also saw the rise of the detective novel, though in Chinese fiction the role of the gumshoe was played by the district magistrate, a combination of detective, prosecutor, judge, and jury. Detective stories had been popular since the Tang Dynasty—predating by a millennium Edgar Allan Poe, usually credited with inventing the genre—though it wasn’t until the 17th century that they grew to novel length. The only translated example I know of is the anonymous Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Di gong an), written sometime in the 18th century, probably by a retired magistrate.36 Judge Dee (Di Renjie, 629–700) was a statesman noted for his rectitude, and became a magnet for stories set in the Tang Dynasty about an honest magistrate who rights wrongs.

  It’s a relatively short novel in 30 chapters, and is ingeniously constructed. It begins with a case of double homicide and false accusation, but while working on this case the judge learns of another possible case of murder and begins investigating that one too. The first case is solved by the 18th chapter, but in the 19th he learns of a possible case of poisoning and begins working on it while stalled on the second. He solves the third case in chapter 23 (the most Sherlock Holmesian of the three) and returns to the second case, which he finally solves in chapter 28. The cases are unrelated, and the author’s handling of three separate story-lines is admirable. Most of the detection work is similar to that in modern examples of the genre, though the judge relies on some supernatural clues—from a ghost, a dream, and divination—that remind us we’re in the premodern world. (The third and trickiest case involves a beautiful but deadly dame: some elements of the genre are timeless.) The most intriguing part of the novel is a brief interlude in play form that occurs in the center of the novel; three nameless characters come on an empty stage for a dreamlike seduction scene, then disappear. Just as the judge relies on clues to solve crimes, the reader is expected to solve the relevance of this lyric interlude to the rest of the novel. (It has to do with the third case, not yet introduced by that point in the novel.) Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee isn’t great literature—the characters and prose are flat, the moral pat—but it is well-executed, entertaining, and provides a positive look at China’s brutal but
meticulous justice system—a system more often subverted in the literary novels of this time.37

  In the middle of the 18th century, two novels were written that so impressed the critics they were added to the four Ming masterpieces to form the Big Six of classic Chinese fiction. The earlier of the two is The Scholars (Rulin [W–G Julin] waishi, literally “Unofficial History of the Forest of Scholars”), composed by Wu Jingzi (1701–54; W–G Wu Ching-tzu) and finished around 1750. At 55 chapters—600 pages in the Yangs’ English translation—it’s the shortest of the six. Ostensibly it is a mild satire of China’s examination system—which, as we’ve seen, had been the target of jibes by Tung Yueh, Li Yu, and Xizhou Sheng—and the poor quality of “scholars” it produced. The system consisted of a series of PhD-level civil-service exams in which students were tested on their knowledge of the Four Books (The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, the Analects of Confucius, and the writings of Mencius) and the Five Classics (The Book of Songs, Classic of History, Book of Changes, Book of Rites, and the Spring and Autumn Annals) and their ability to write an “eight-legged” essay on a chosen theme from them. Passing these exams guaranteed social standing and a comfy government job, so most intelligent men studied for the exams, some retaking them all their lives in an attempt to pass. The system was rife with corruption and cheating—some would pay others to take the exam for them, or bribe the examiner, or rely on family influence—and even those who passed honestly did so by suppressing any sign of originality or independent thinking, concentrating instead on parroting the approved commentators on these classics. The predictable result of this faulty system were graduates who were scholars in name only, more intent on careerism and wheeling-dealing than on applying Confucian principles. Those who failed took it hard, for it doomed them to poverty and ostracism. In The Tower of Myriad Mirrors, Monkey observes their reaction after the results of an exam are posted (another of Tung Yueh’s wonderful lists):