by Steven Moore
Like an unthinkable collaboration between Samuel Richardson and the Marquis de Sade—Clarissa meets Juliette—Yesou puyan combines high moral seriousness with a perverse fascination with deviant sex. Like the monk Tripitaka in The Journey to the West, our hero is constantly under siege by lascivious women who crave his semen and go to bizarre lengths to try to extract it from him, which he always resists, but not before the author favors us with pornographic descriptions of their slutty efforts. The author apparently decided to outperform both The Plum in the Golden Vase and Cao Qujing’s Guwangyan in graphic sexual content, and like the latter it combines elements from all Chinese genres of fiction, cleansing them of unorthodoxy and rewriting the literatus as a hero rather than a loser. It all sounds like a grandiose exercise in wish-fulfillment and sex fanatsy; I’m reminded of eccentric Frederick Rolfe’s Hadrian the Seventh, in which the author imagined himself as the pope and savior of Catholicism while in real life he was buggering Venetian boys. Like Sade’s monstrous novels, Yesou puyan exerts a lurid fascination, but since the author sounds neurotic and a little creepy—like the leader of a neo-Confucian sex cult—we’ll back away slowly and conclude this section instead with a fanciful scholarly novel that, although not finished until early in the next century, was begun in the 1790s and draws upon all the features of premodern Chinese fiction for one last fireworks display of fabulation.
How about a gender-bending novel that (in the words of its English translator) “has the combined nature of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Gulliver’s Travels, Aesop’s Fables and the Odyssey, with Alice in Wonderland thrown in for good measure”? Behold Flowers in the Mirror (Jinghua yuan) by a polymath named Li Ruzhen (W–G Li Ju-chen, 1763–1830). Sun Jiaxun, a leading authority on the novel, suggests Li began it around 1795 while living with his brother in Haizhow and studying under the great scholar Ling Tingkan (1757–1809), from whom he picked up the wide erudition flaunted in this learned novel, and finished it 20 years later. The earliest extant edition is dated 1818, after which Li continued to fine-tune it for an illustrated edition published in 1828.
Like most fantasy novels, Flowers in the Mirror sounds silly in summary. At a birthday celebration for the Daoist goddess Western Queen Mother, the Lady of the Moon and her friend Aunt Wind conspire against the Fairy of a Hundred Flowers and dare her to make all flowers bloom at once as a party trick. The Fairy insists this would go against nature’s timetable and refuses; she promises “willingly to go to earth to suffer migration in the rimless ocean of births and deaths, if I should ever be so muddle-headed as to order all the flowers to bloom at the same time.”67 Many centuries later, the king of hell decides to disrupt the Tang Dynasty by letting loose a fox-spirit on earth, who incarnates herself as China’s first and only female emperor, Wu Zetian (ruled 684–705), but not before the malicious Lady of the Moon suggests Wu should demonstrate her might and glory by commanding all flowers to bloom simultaneously in winter. She does, they do, and the Fairy and her 99 flower fairies are sent down to earth to be reincarnated as girls.
The Fairy of a Hundred Flowers is born into the family of a restless scholar named Tang Ao; thwarted in his career because of his association with rebels who opposed Empress Wu’s seizure of the throne, he decides to retire at age 50 and become a Daoist immortal. Conveniently, his brother-in-law Lin Zhiyang is a merchant who regularly travels into several remote nations of the world, so Tang Ao asks to join him on his next voyage. Before leaving, Tang Ao is told by a Daoist priest in a dream that he needs to prepare himself first before seeking the Dao with works of charity, and recommends gathering the dozen flower-spirits who were reincarnated overseas (rather than in China, like his daughter) and bring them back to the mainland.
In the chapters that follow, Tang Ao and Lin Zhiyang visit over 30 exotic lands, which allows Li Ruzhen to criticize obliquely the customs of his own time (thought not as bitterly as Swift did in Gulliver’s Travels, more like Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland). They visit the Country of Gentlemen (“where people yield to each other’s wishes instead of competing for selfish gain” [565]), the Country of Giants (referring to the largeness of their hearts), the Country of Tall People, of Restless People, Black-toothed People, Long-eared People, Intestineless People, Dog-headed People, Black-bottomed People, Little People, etc., where they occasionally encounter bright 14-year-old girls (often disguised as boys)—that is, the reincarnated flower fairies. (Most of the places are from ancient Chinese travelers’ tales, fleshed out with Li’s satiric imagination.) Among the more interesting stops are the Country of Sexless People and especially the Country of Women, where women dress and act like men and vice-versa. Lin catches the eye of the “king” of this land and is forcibly transformed into a woman by means of painful foot-binding, ear-piercing, and other indignities. Tang Ao helps rescue him, but decides to stay abroad and pursue the Dao while Lin returns to China with his bouquet of flower fairies.
Tang’s daughter Xiaoshan, distraught at her father’s absence, joins Lin’s next voyage to search for him; she rescues more of her fairies but fails to find her father, only a letter from him urging her to return and take the civil-service exams for girls (ages 16 and under) recently instituted by the feminist Empress Wu. She and the other 99 fairies pass the exams, which is followed by 10 days of celebrations, dinners, games, and conversation in an enclosed garden (spread out over 30 chapters). Afterwards, Tang’s daughter resumes her search for her father and for personal immortality, while others get married and join their husbands in an uprising to restore Wu’s son to the throne. Unlike the bulk of the novel, these final chapters are dominated by young men. The rebels have to break through four fortified passes guarding the capital before they can overthrow the queen, each of which represents a vice that a virtuous man must overcome: drunkenness, anger, lechery, and avarice. (Li demonstrates his wisdom by fingering greed as the worst vice; sex is the least in his view.) Each pass is protected by a magical labyrinth, a surrealistic site where soldiers brave enough to enter behold allegorical symbols and historical figures from the past, tempted by the vices they represent. (Not all survive.) The queen is overthrown, “natural” order restored as her son is returned to the throne, and all that’s left is for someone to tell the tale. The pet white monkey of the Fairy of a Hundred Flowers goes off with an inscribed tablet recording all these events to find a scholar to turn it into a book. (This, like much else in the novel, is very reminiscent of A Dream of Red Mansions, which our author must have known.) The fairy monkey searches down through the centuries for someone suitable but is rejected by three of China’s famous historians—all of whom ignored Empress Wu’s achievements—so he finally settles for Li Ruzhen, “who had a reputation of sorts,” and who agrees to write it up “for his own amusement” (896).68
In recent years, feminist critics have praised Flowers in the Mirror for its emancipated attitude toward women, its exposure of sexual double standards and the cultural construction of gender, and for its cast of talented girls. This must be tempered, however, with the facts that (a) the novel opens with the mischief caused by bickering women, (b) a female emperor is considered as contrary to nature as flowers blooming in winter, (c) mention is made throughout of slave girls without a whisper of emancipation for them, and (d) the resourceful girls of the first half of the novel turn into reactionary housewives by the end, willing to commit suicide to preserve their virtue if their soldier-husbands die in battle.69 The author is critical of society, but only insofar as it has strayed from Confucian principles; he doesn’t call for a reevaluation (much less rejection) of traditional values, especially regarding the role of women in Chinese society. And even though he praises the Daoist ideal of detachment from the mundane world, Li’s obvious fascination with the workings of the world undercuts the religious sentiments of the novel. Its title may come from traditional images of the illusoriness of life—“flowers in the mirror, moon in the water”—quoted in the novel’s opening chapter,70 but the scholar Li would have been inte
rested in the botanical particulars of those flowers, the history of mirrors, and in calculating the angle of refraction of the moon in water. Like the Buddhism in DRM, the fairytale Daoism of Flowers in the Mirror is mostly window dressing.
Rather than play the social critic or Daoist preacher, Li Ruzhen was more eager to show off his encyclopedic knowledge. He includes in his novel discussions of almost every scholarly topic imaginable, and the novel is filled with lists, recipes, medical prescriptions, mathematical diagrams, a phonetics chart, and typographical oddities—most spectacularly, a huge palindromic poem near the beginning of chapter 41 that can be read backward, forwards, up, down, and in various swirls to yield hundreds of short poems.71 “Chapters 81–93,” C. T. Hsia notes, “amounting to more than 60 pages of small print, especially, are quite unparalleled for the author’s minute description of a banquet game that calls for the hundred girls to quote from a hundred different classics.”72 Like other Chinese scholar-novelists, Li also plays metafictional games. In chapter 23, Lin Zhiyang tries to sell the natives of the Country of Elegant Scholars on a book entitled Shao Tzu—a take-off on Lao Tzu’s Daodejing (Book of the Way, 5th century bce?)—which is actually an advertisement for Li’s own novel:
But this Shao Tzu, or The Young Philosopher, while setting out to provide entertainment, has for its hidden purpose exhortation of men to reform, even through many veiled hints and suggestions.
For in this book are to be found the teachings of the Hundred Schools; a gallery of men and women; a whole collection of flowers and birds; the arts of calligraphy and painting, of music, and of chess; the sciences of medicine, of divination and astrology, of phonology and phonetics, of arithmetic and computation. It further contains all manners of riddles, an extended drinking game, the Double Six, cards, archery, football, a plant competition, ‘arrows and pot,’ and a hundred other pastimes, so diverting as to chase away the languor of sleep even on the hottest afternoon and so mirthful as to cause much spurting out of rice if recounted at the dinner table. (trans. Chang 1973, 406)
In chapters 89 and 90, a fairy visits the girls’ epic party and narrates a long poem recounting their earlier history as fairies and foretelling their futures. Hsia describes it as “a thousand-word poem in the ancient, five-word style. It adopts a single rhyme throughout and does not duplicate a single character, with the exception of many repetitive phrases to be expected in ancient-style poetry. It is altogether a most difficult poetic feat . . .” (221). And like A Dream of Red Mansions, Flowers in the Mirror ends with the author agreeing to write the novel we’ve just read. (Li promises a sequel, but never wrote it.)
The Destiny of Flowers in the Mirror is not the greatest Chinese novel, and nearly every one of its formal and thematic features can be found in the greater ones that preceded it. It is considered the most erudite of them all, though the scholarly consensus is that its erudition is often tedious, and the whole thing a Menippean mélange that doesn’t quite jell. As Ellen Widmer puts it, “reading Jinghua yuan becomes a process of balancing one interpretative framework against another, of choosing between less than wholly convincing alternatives, and of emphasizing some features over others.”73 Flowers in the Mirror is a farewell party for the classic Chinese novel, one final blow-out commemorating all its characteristic features: adventure, satire, myth, magic, manners, learning, and allegory, not to mention a toyshop of China dolls with names like Purple Lily, Melody Orchid, Baby Phoenix, Red Jade, Rainbow Cloud, Star Glory, Silver Moonlight, Melting Spring, Brocade Heart, and (my favorite) Fragrant Book. Like the girls’ victory celebration, it may go on too long and get a little pedantic, but it’s a fitting conclusion to one of the most sophisticated bodies of fiction in world literature.
KOREAN FICTION
China has always exerted an enormous influence over Korea, which originated as one of its provinces. Even after the peninsular kingdom became independent in the 8th century, it maintained its giant neighbor’s religious beliefs, civil-service examination system, and its alphabet, which wasn’t supplanted until 1444 when its brilliant King Sejong (ruled 1418–50) invented the simpler Hangul script used ever since. (As in Japan, the educated classes were bilingual and continued to use Chinese for many functions.) Consequently, it’s not surprising that early Korean literature shares many features with that of China, whose novels in particular would always be popular in the Land of Morning Calm.
For example, Korea’s earliest significant fiction was a response to Luo Guanzhong’s great adventure novel The Water Margin (late 14th century). A courtier and poet named Ho Kyun (1569–1618) condemned it as “licentious, wily, cunning, and unsuitable for education,”74 and set out to write a cleaner version that wound up being even more seditious. The Tale of Hong Kiltong (Hong Kiltong chon, early 17th century) is a novella set during the reign of King Sejong, and is structured in thirds. The first third features a gifted boy who suffers indignities because he was born to his father’s concubine rather than to his wife. At age 10, Hong Kiltong becomes the jealous target of his father’s other concubine, who conspires to get rid of him. Escaping assassination (by way of magic, which seems to symbolize visionary individualism), he conscientiously takes leave of his parents and shakes the dust of Seoul off his feet to head “aimlessly toward the shrouded mountain recesses” (127).75
Alienated from his family, Kiltong becomes alienated from society during the middle third of the tale. After several years of wandering, Kiltong stumbles upon a bandits’ lair in a valley, reminiscent of the one in The Water Margin, whose motley crew make him their leader after a test of strength. Beginning with a raid on a Buddhist temple, he becomes a successful but scrupulous outlaw who steals only from corrupt officials, never from the poor or “the rightful property of the state” (130). After magically creating seven clones of himself, each with his own band of outlaws, Kiltong wins a wondrous reputation and frustrates the king and his officers by seeming to be ubiquitous. King Sejong commands Kiltong’s (legitimate) half-brother In-hyong to capture him, who does so by appealing to Kiltong’s sense of filial duty. Turning himself in, Kiltong complains that he would never have become an outlaw had he been treated as a member of the family and a legitimate member of society. But the king is puzzled when the other seven Kiltongs turn themselves in too, and all eight then vanish. (I’d like to think the author is acknowledging that a man can play many roles—loyal son, disloyal subject, hero to the people, enemy of the state, magician, scholar—but it may be just one more trick the author plays on the reader in a section filled with magic.) Kiltong then demands to be appointed Minister of War in recognition of his talents, but as soon as the king accedes to his request, Kiltong abandons Korea for China.
In the final third of the novella, Kiltong settles on an island and has his band of outlaws join him there. One day he comes upon some monsters, kills their leader, then rescues and marries two girls they had abducted. Divining that his father is dying, he returns to Seoul disguised as a Buddhist monk; his father dies before he arrives, but not before leaving instructions that his prodigal son is to be treated as legitimate should he ever return. Kiltong is reconciled with his family, but not with his country: he takes his father’s coffin back to China for burial, then a few years later attacks an island kingdom and makes it his own, and makes sure King Sejong back in Korea hears about it. “Hong Kiltong is indeed a remarkable man of splendid talents” (146), he announces, further validating our hero’s sense of self-worth. But Kiltong never returns to Korea, reigning for 30 years over his utopian kingdom and dying peacefully at age 72.
Although the novella starts off realistically enough, it quickly moves into the realm of magic to point the moral that character and ability are more important than pedigree, a universal fairytale motif. This transition also allows the author to preserve his hero’s sheen, which would be tarnished if the tale had stayed in the messy, realistic world depicted in The Water Margin. Ironically, this G-rated version of the Chinese classic was soon condemned for being unethi
cal and unpatriotic; after Ho Kyun was executed in 1618—implicated in a failed coup led by some marginalized illegitimate sons (like his protagonist)—a contemporary conservative critic called Yi Sik snickered he got what he deserved for having written such a scurrilous work. Rejecting society and state in favor of self-exile and autonomy, The Tale of Hong Kiltong was considered by Yi Sik and his ilk to be as “unsuitable for education” as the author claims to have found The Water Margin, though something tells me he was as wily and cunning as Luo’s novel and knew exactly what he was doing. So did the state, which is why it executed him.
Luo Guanzhong’s other historical fiction, the monumental war novel Three Kingdoms, literally haunts a novella composed later in the 17th century, The Record of the Black Dragon Year (Imjin nok), a fairytale version of the devastating Imjin War (1592–98).76 It opens as Guan Yu, one of the three oath-brothers of Three Kingdoms, appears to a woman in a dream and annunciates she will give birth to a boy who will someday provide valuable service to the king of Korea. Lord Guan makes similar appearances throughout the novella, but his ghostly presence is about all the Record has in common with Three Kingdoms. Luo’s novel has been famously described as “seven parts fact and three parts fiction”; the Record reverses those proportions for a compensatory dream version of the war that celebrates Korean acts of valor over the historical hardships they endured during the Imjin War. (Most of those valorous acts are performed by ordinary subjects; the anonymous literatus who compiled this version is fairly contemptuous of the clueless king and his corrupt ministers.) Even as the war was in progress, eyewitness reports and oral tales began circulating, but our author pretty much ignored those inconvenient truths and waved a wand of fantasy over the whole thing. Characters are nine feet tall, wear impossibly heavy armor, practice many forms of magic, and are capable of any supernatural deed. Appropriately enough, the style is as fanciful as the plot: “Upon seeing the deaths of his soldiers and generals, the Japanese general Kiyomasa became furious. Stretching his lips two feet wide and gnashing his teeth, Kiyomasa put on a twin-phoenix helmet and a three-thousand-pound suit of armor. He came forward shouting like a white tiger that grips a person in his mouth while perched on a steep cliff with a waterfall.”77 The result is cartoonish and extravagant, as flamboyant as a Korean pop video, but the novella nonetheless is enjoyable as long as one doesn’t take it too seriously. It’s more interesting for psychological and political reasons than for literary ones, an example of how some people will repress and revise a painful experience to make it more tolerable, even heroic.