Allusion to Fiction

In one major component of his commentary, literary allusion, the author could draw on a world of implication that his audience understood. Certain of the chapters are headed by T’ang poems, and one of the sexual bouts concludes, with delightful incongruity, in the last line of Su Tung-p’o’s Ch’ienCh’ih-pifu (First Prose-poem on the Red Cliff).⁷ Thus the author reminded his readers of his ties to dominant literary traditions in his culture. But as contemporary notions of pen-se demanded, the author kept his allusions to the classics infrequent and veiled. Instead, he drew on fiction, drama, and song, the half-literati, half-popular genres whose role in Ming culture has been discussed above. Drama and song will be examined in later chapters; here we will look at the genre in which Chinp’ingmei took its place, vernacular fiction. The conventions of hua-pen and novel, which shape Chinp’ingmei, help to give specific incidents in Chinp’ingmei a generic meaning.

The fiction incorporated into Chinp’ingmei serves to raise moral issues familiar to the audience: chastity, loyalty, the relation of the subject to the state. It functions as “commentary” in that it helps to establish the book’s retributive scheme, since familiar stories and story-types had taught readers what to expect from the resolution of these moral issues. But this fiction is not merely quoted in Chinp’ingmei; it is transformed. The moral universe of Chinp’ingmei is wider and deeper than in these earlier works, and the earlier fiction carries a different weight in its new environment. In this sense, Chinp’ingmei “reads” earlier fiction as we ought to read Chinp’ingmei, testing its moral assumptions against wider experience. The author clearly intended us to remember these moral assumptions: to revalorize them where necessary, but not to discard them.

We can see this in the lines on passion and beauty (ch’ing and se) which open Chinp’ingmei. This poem and commentary are drawn from a mid-Ming folly-and-consequences story of the sort discussed above in Chapter 1, characterized by “Hangchow realism” and an unrelenting stress on retribution. The story, Wen-chingyüan-yanghui (The Lovers’ Rendezvous at which Murder is Committed), is a hua-pen of a highly conventional type.⁸ The sexual drives of a licentious woman ruin several men and a young boy. The woman meets the sort of violent end that conventional retribution required. She has all the traits typical of licentious women in Chinese fiction: as soon as we see her leaning in her doorway, staring out at passers-by, we can predict that she is up to no good. This is clearly a cautionary tale. The story bears out its opening poem about female succubi, in that it is the woman’s fatal sexual drive that kills the men one after another.

Chinp’ingmei begins with the hua-pen’s opening lines on passion and beauty, and, expanding the next few paragraphs of the story, follows the verse with several pages about imperial contenders and the women who proved fatal to them. The opening pages of Chinp’ingmei thus seem to set up the same moral universe as that of the hua-pen. But in the “reevaluation...of traditional values and issues” that Andrew Plaks has called characteristic of the great sixteenth-century Chinese novels,⁹ this moral and social universe are greatly expanded in Chinp’ingmei. Sexual behavior is the sole focus of moral responsibility in Wen-chingyüan-yanghui, but in Chinp’ingmei the desire for money and status influence the action as much as the desire for sexual gratification. Hsi-men Ch’ing brings on his grotesque death as much by his exhaustion in the service of a corrupt court as by his sexual activity. (Chinp’ingmei thus makes women no more blameworthy than their sexual patrons.) It is not only “passion and beauty,” but all delusion and illegitimate desire that lead to ruin.

Still, though the novel goes beyond it, the story of Wen-chingyüan-yanghui was obviously important to the author of Chinp’ingmei. Various incidents in Chinp’ingmei have their analogues in the story: P’an Chin-lien’s vicious treatment of her maid, Li P’ing-erh’s vision of her murdered husband returning to avenge himself. The tragic meaning of Chinp’ingmei as a whole - the belief that violations of order (including sexual order) can destroy the family line - is stated explicitly by the hua-pen narrator in the second of the brief prologue tales to Wen-chingyüan-yanghui. These elements sound the hua-pen’s note of retribution throughout Chinp’ingmei.

The sixteenth-century Shui-huchuan, whose chapters 24 through 27 provide the outline and much of the language for the first 10 chapters of Chinp’ingmei, also sounds this note of retribution in the later novel.¹⁰ But Shui-huchuan is a much more powerful and complex presence in Chinp’ingmei than is Wen-chingyüan-yanghui. Drama, oral performance, and written fiction had made the Shui-hu tales familiar to everyone. And Shui-huchuan, with its conventional attribution to the highly respected Lo Kuan-chung (the author of San-kuoyen-i), was widely recognized as a masterpiece. By using four chapters of this work as his “prologue story,” the author of Chinp’ingmei immediately broadened the moral and social universe of his novel beyond that of Wen-chingyüan-yanghui. Now the social field included everyone from wastrels to Ministers at court, and the geography of Chinp’ingmei was widened, by implication, to include the entire empire. But the currency of the Shui-hu tales meant that everyone also knew what the conclusion would be, or “ought to be.” P’an Chin-lien could not possibly escape the vengeance of her brother-in-law Wu Sung, though he remains banished in Chinp’ingmei until Chapter 87. Just as in the case of Wen-chingyüan-yanghui, the author’s inclusion of Shui-huchuan kept the eventual fate of adulterous women subliminally present to readers. But unlike Wen-chingyüan-yanghui, the Shui-hu references also reminded readers that an entire empire was going to its doom.

The story of Hsi-men Ch’ing and P’an Chin-lien is a brief incident with few consequences in Shui-huchuan; by Chapter 27 of Shui-huchuan both P’an Chin-lien and Hsi-men Ch’ing are dead. The story seems chiefly intended to exhibit the misogyny of the Shui-hu tradition, its view of women as succubi. The author of Chinp’ingmei, however, expanded this material, widening its psychological field just as his use of the Shui-hu tradition had widened the social and geographical field of Chinp’ingmei beyond that of Wen-chingyüan-yanghui. The P’an Chin-lien of Shui-huchuan is a stock lascivious character, urged on by a conventionally conniving old woman go-between. In Chinp’ingmei, however, P’an Chin-lien is by turns cruel, anxious, lonely, arrogant, and pathetically pleased with her illusory triumphs. By giving her eighty-seven chapters instead of four, the author draws us into her schemes and fantasies, and he gives her personality such consistency, and her schemes such variety, as to insure our interest. This sympathy is also extended to other women whose conduct is judged unfavorably by the book as a whole.¹¹

Such comprehension and compassion build up a much more convincing chain of causality within the novel than would have been possible without them. When the empress of Shih-langfu-machuan brings down the empire through her talebearing, for example, we remain detached even as we recognize the time-honored principles embodied in the plot. But in Chinp’ingmei, the brilliantly rendered quarrels and tales keep the message of the book inseparable from personalities in whom we can recognize our own feelings. The quarrels are always similar, and they dramatize the central issues of the book. Some small event ripples out through the network of alliances and rivalries that holds the household together, and leads to a spectacular confrontation. By Chapter 75, in a particularly rich example, Wu Yüeh-niang has lost all patience with the concubines who monopolize her husband. She and P’an Chin-lien burst out at each other in such a way as to bring up various old grievances: P’an Chin-lien’s embarrassment at her mother’s poverty (Wu Yüeh-niang has just accused her, to a servant, of sending her mother home); Hsi-men Ch’ing’s gifts to P’an Chin-lien; Wu Yüeh-niang’s fury that P’an Chin-lien’s maid Ch’un-mei has insulted a singer that Yüeh-niang had invited. Their outburst, translated below, follows a number of querulous complaints by Wu Yüeh-niang to the servants and wives:

The quarrel continues until Meng Yü-lou and Wu Yüeh-niang’s sister-in-law separate them. P’an Chin-lien, who has crumpled to the floor in a tantrum and demanded a divorce, must be carried out.

When P’an Chin-lien tells Hsi-men Ch’ing a weeping, self-serving version of this quarrel in the following chapter, the whole affair comes full circle.¹⁴ Hsi-men Ch’ing is moved to the tenderness that caused Wu Yüeh-niang’s wrath in the first place. As always, the charges and countercharges give the reader a magnificent review of what has been troubling the household, freeing the author from the necessity to summarize. The quarrel thus functions as a device for advancing the narrative, as well as for deepening mimesis. And this quarrel is inserted into the larger account of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s hectic activity on behalf of the corrupt officials who pour into Ch’ing-ho hsien in this decade of chapters, representing the court with its own favorites and factions. This ripple of meaning is quite a different effect from what is found in Shui-huchuan, where martial heroes and stout fellows tackle corrupt officials head-on. Chinp’ingmei, without rejecting the issues raised by Shui-huchuan, has found a new way to embody them.

Most of the other hua-pen which are alluded to or quoted from in Chinp’ingmei function more or less as the Wen-chingyüan-yanghui story does.¹⁵ They deal primarily with illicit love and with the loyalty or disloyalty of servants to masters. As in the case of Wen-chingyüan-yanghui, Chinp’ingmei transcends them in structural complexity, depth of characterization, and richness of meaning. The stereotypical conniving nun of Chieh-chih-erhchi (The Story of the Ring), who brings young lovers together, is used to establish the novel’s equation between sexual and official corruption. (In Chinp’ingmei, Hsi-men Ch’ing judges a court-case arising from her actions.) The murderous servant turned merchant of Kang-k’ou yü-weng (The Old Fisherman of the Harbor) serves to characterize the topsy-turvy venal society of the novel. And Chih-ch’engChangChu-kuan (Steadfast Master Chang), from which the account of P’an Chin-lien’s origins is borrowed, contains the sort of numerological joke that is typical of Chinp’ingmei. In the hua-pen, the girl is horrified to see that her new master suffers from “four or five kinds of debility.” In Chinp’ingmei, P’an Chin-lien’s master Chang develops his five kinds of debility only after sleeping with her. This passing emphasis on the number five is just like what we have seen in allusion to pao-chüan. Chinp’ingmei, with its greater breadth, makes an implicit comment on the limitations of these earlier works, but by incorporating them the author raises moral issues that would have been clear to his audience.

Puns and Puzzles

The author of the 1494 San-kuoyen-i preface wants us to examine our own behavior when we read of the heroes of old: anything else, he states, is not worthy to be called reading. The author of Chinp’ingmei, describing fallible contemporary mortals, clearly wanted the same thing from his readers. But he achieves this aim by more than just mimesis, however convincing. He also calls on us to solve puzzles, and thus engages the intellect as well as the passions. Puns abound in the novel: names of characters like Wu Tien-en (“No Trace of Benevolence”) or Pu Chih-tao (“Don’t Know”) among Hsi-men Ching’s cronies, or the singing-girl Ch’i Hsiang-erh, whose surname Ch’i (literally, “to regulate”) calls up the Ta-hsüeh every time her brothel (Ch’i-chia, or “regulate the household”) is mentioned. The careful formal organization of the narrative (the regular rhythm of the ten-chapter chüan, with a climax of sorts in the ninth chapter of each chüan) forces a sense of pattern on us. And a series of verbal clues remind us that parallels are as important as plot in Chinp’ingmei. We have already seen how the surname Ts’ai links Hsi-men Ch’ing’s first son and first post, and how the surname Hsüeh emphasizes the parallel functions of the corrupt eunuch and the corrupt nun. Similarly, the baby Kuan-ko “gives a cold shudder” as he returns with his nurse after his ill-advised visit to Hsi-men Ch’ing’s newly constructed tomb, and Hsi-men Ch’ing gives an identical shudder when a whirlwind (the typical manifestation of an avenging spirit) startles him after his final visit to his mistress Wang Liu-erh.¹⁶ (Both visits violate the rules that ought to govern the family, and these are the sorts of violation that in the book’s terms lead to death.) The very name Chin-lien or Golden Lotus (which traditionally denoted a woman’s tiny slipper) is used to link the parallel careers of P’an Chin-lien and the maid Sung Hui-lien. (Hui-lien’s original name is Chin-lien, and the two women’s rivalry is expressed through a competition over who wears the tiniest chin-lien. Given the eroticism associated with bound feet, this translates into a competition for Hsi-men Ch’ing’s sexual favors.)¹⁷ When P’an Chin-lien bestrides Hsi-men Ch’ing in their final and fatal sexual encounter, the language is the same as that which described her murder of her first husband.¹⁸ These and other parallels generalize the story despite its brilliant particularization. They show us patterns of behavior and fate that are by definition important to any writer of cautionary literature.

These patterns are emphasized by hints of the laws governing the cosmos, laws to which the Hsi-men family should pay heed. We can see this particularly clearly in Chapter 27, which contains some of the most striking sexual description in the novel.¹⁹ Nothing in this episode is simply what it seems: descriptions of clothing hint at official misconduct, and the list of dishes at a meal points to the sexual jealousy destroying the household. This is the chapter in which Hsi-men Ch’ing, making love to Li P’ing-erh, learns that she is pregnant, and in which he torments P’an Chin-lien for her treatment of Li P’ing-erh, by tying her hands and feet and tossing iced plums into her vagina. But key words and phrases throughout the chapter remind us of the limits to his power.

Let us first consider the language of heat and cold, which works to show that Hsi-men Ch’ing’s glory is necessarily ephemeral. As the Ch’ing critic Chang Chu-p’o observed three centuries ago, the first half of Chinp’ingmei, when Hsi-men Ch’ing’s power is in the ascendant, is dominated by images of heat. The second half, which witnesses his growing exhaustion and the family’s decline, is “cold.”²⁰ By employing these images, the author was able to draw on all of their traditional associations, reminding us that the yang forces of virility, heat, and domination exist in a complementary relation to the yin qualities of cold and decline. This complementary relationship involves an endless cycling between the two states. In traditional Chinese thought, neither was expected to remain forever dominant, and arrival at the zenith is thus enough to imply an inevitable decline.²¹ Seen in this light, the insistence on Hsi-men Ch’ing’s “heat” in the first half of the novel is a way of signaling to the reader the decline that will inevitably follow, and indeed Chang Chu-p’o points out that among the images of heat are other images suggesting the cold to come (je-chungleng).

Chapter 27 bears this out. Immediately after the ethical framework of the chapter has been established by reference to Hsi-men Ch’ing’s misdeeds, the narrator evokes the summer heat with hyperbolic intensity. He describes the season, quotes a T’ang poem that begs for relief from the heat, and then retards the action by inserting a descriptive set-piece reminiscent of Shui-huchuan, concerning types of men who do or do not fear the heat.

In the T’ang poem, the sun is at the zenith, blinding the heavens and scorching the earth.²² The poem’s very stress on heat carries with it the understanding that this condition is one of imbalance, and the last two lines remind us that it must eventually be “swept away” by the breezes of autumn. To reinforce this warning, Chapter 27 is not only filled with references to heat (in all its metaphoric senses), but is also shot through with foreboding, conveyed almost subliminally through inconspicuous repetition of the word liang, or “cold.” P’an Chin-lien, jealous of Li P’ing-erh’s pregnancy, makes a series of sarcastic remarks that tie the word liang to the notion of sterility. She sits on a cold (liang) stool, and when the third wife Meng Yü-lou chides her for endangering her health, she replies that it can do no harm, as she has no child in her belly.²³ She goes on to eat cold food, elicits the same concern, and makes the same reply.²⁴ Later, P’an Chin-lien will cause the death of Li P’ing-erh’s son, helping to ensure the family’s eventual sterility. And we find that the T’ang poem has already given us a subtle hint of what is to come: it is the chin-feng, or the autumn breezes associated with the element metal (chin), that will sweep away the summer heat. Chin is of course the element associated with P’an Chin-lien, and it is repeatedly associated with danger to Li P’ing-erh’s son.²⁵ The association of P’an Chin-lien with the word liang and with the notion of sterility thus evokes “cold in heat” in the gravest terms of Confucian rhetoric, the absence of posterity.²⁶

This wordplay is subtle, but it ties the T’ang poem to the emphases of the chapter and the book in a way too accurate to be ignored. Moreover, the evocative use of the word liang has many parallels in Chapter 27. Li P’ing-erh’s linen (chiao-pu) vest²⁷ recalls the chiao-pu robes that Hsi-men Ch’ing has sent to Ts’ai Ching, his corrupt patron at court, a few pages earlier.²⁸ The word chiao-pu thus relates two kinds of impropriety: the illegitimacy with which Li P’ing-erh was brought into the household, and the illegitimate connections that Hsi-men Ch’ing has formed outside it. In a similar example, the meal that Hsi-men Ch’ing and P’an Chin-lien eat in the grape-arbor at the end of the chapter contains wine in a golden lotus-pod (chinlien-p’eng) goblet, and meat shreds (la-jou-ssu).²⁹ Since the goblet echoes P’an Chin-lien’s name, the reader is alerted that the contents of this meal comment on those who are eating it, and indeed la-jou-ssu is a phrase that P’an Chin-lien had used while sitting on her cold stool and eating cold food: “I’m an old woman, good for nothing but to eat dried meat (la-jou), one shred (ssu) at a time”.³⁰

If we question whether this verbal byplay is intentional, we have only to look at the way the author uses the descriptive set-piece about the summer heat. This long passage, translated below, is a tissue of clichés, and the explosion of these clichés in the rest of the chapter makes clear the book’s self-conscious use of language.

The passage goes on to describe the pleasures of Buddhist and Taoist monks.

From this early point in the chapter all the way to its conclusion, words and phrases from the conventional set-piece are woven into the narrative. The setting of the action is an example: Hsi-men Ch’ing is in just the sort of elaborate garden described in the set-piece, with “breezy balconies” (feng-t’ing), a “snowy cave” (hsüh-tung), and plums and melons cooling in a basin of ice water. Now, the descriptive passage and similar passages in Shui-huchuan already imply that society is better served by the toiling farmers, merchants, and soldiers than by those who dwell at ease within their palaces. This implication is borne out in Chinp’ingmei: Hsi-men Ch’ing’s garden is built on the body of his murdered sworn brother Hua Tzu-hsü, whose property it once was, and whose former wife has become his concubine. But neither Shui-huchuan nor hua-pen literature had embodied this conventional wisdom quite as Chinp’ingmei was to do. In the set-piece, fragrant balls of jasmine perfume the halls of the wealthy. In the narrative that follows, Hsi-men Ch’ing praises Li P’ing-erh’s “white bottom” as they make love, and later he calls for jasmine soap to wash his face. P’an Chin-lien, who has overheard them, remarks at once that she supposes the jasmine soap will “make his face as white as some people’s bottoms.’³² In the set-piece, maidens fan their masters, and cool matting is spread on elegant beds. In Chinp’ingmei, the maid Ch’un-mei waves her fan as Hsi-men Ch’ing arouses P’an Chin-lien;³³ P’an Chin-lien has already called for her “cool bamboo matting” to be brought into the garden, where she has removed her clothing to arouse Hsi-men Ch’ing.³⁴ And we see what happens to the iced plums at the end of the chapter!

The Revalorization of Conventional Wisdom

In Chapter 27 the author is turning literary convention to ends of his own, poking fun at his characters but also at the clichés that would have been used, conventionally, to describe them. Authors who could play with language in this way were not constrained by literal levels of meaning. Implication and metaphor were their stock in trade, and we have already noted the habit of allegorical reading that was characteristic of the age. The mutual influence of the Three Teachings meant that terms from one sort of discourse or another were constantly being revalorized to serve new ends, and it should not surprise us to find this tendency in fiction as well. We see it in the author’s use of a well-known phrase that appears frequently in Chinp’ingmei:

In Chinp’ingmei this cliché is not so much exploded as expanded, given back to us on a deeper level of truth. Even more than the language of heat and cold, this conventional phrase is made to carry the moral weight of the novel.

In Chapter 3, where it is one line of the prefatory poem,³⁵ and in Chapter 81, where it is part of a couplet inserted in the text,³⁶ the phrase expresses a sense of the calamities men bring on themselves. (In Chapter 3, Hsi-men Ch’ing begins his seduction of P’an Chin-lien, which is the first step in his progression toward death. In Chapter 81, his servants plunder the household after he dies.) In the verse that closes Chapter 94, the line is expressly linked to self-deception:

Here in Chapter 94, the sexual desires of various parties have led to Ch’en Ching-chi’s successful masquerade as the cousin of Ch’un-mei (now married to the eminent Commander Chou). In this same chapter the fourth wife Sun Hsüeh-o is sold, through a series of strategems, into a brothel. The same cliché is thus used over the course of the novel to comment on financial deception, sexual deception, deception of self, and deception of others.

This should not surprise us, as the term se, here translated as “sex,” is actually a polyvalent term for which “sex” is an accurate but limited translation. In the Buddhist lexicon, which contributed much to the discourse of even those late Ming literati who were not Buddhist, the term se encompasses sexual attraction as one component of a wider meaning, in which se signifies the world of transitory phenomena, mere appearance, illusion. But given the basically Confucian orientation Chinp’ingmei, the author seems to indicate that the illusion in question is the sort of self-deception warned against in texts like the Ta-hsüeh, rather than specifically the rūpa of Buddhism.³⁸ (The minute, circumstantial presentation of daily life in Chinp’ingmei focuses our attention on earthly problems that require earthly solutions; the answer does not seem to be a retreat from a world of phenomena regarded as illusory or insubstantial).

By repeating this and similar lines throughout the book, in contexts like those just described, the author Chinp’ingmei establishes a range of significance for the term se that includes both its restricted sexual meanings and its broader philosophical meanings. As a result, when we reread the book (and rereading is required for an appreciation of many of the effects in Chinp’ingmei) will understand that even the use of the term that includes both its restricted sexual meanings and its broader philosophical meanings. As a result, when we reread the book (and rereading is required for an appreciation of many of the effects in Chinp’ingmei), we will understand that even the use of the term se in what seems to be a popular religious context can contribute to the book’s essentially Confucian outlook. An example is found in the funeral observances for Li P’ing-erh in Chapter 65, where a conventional quatrain of the sort discussed above begins the eulogy offered by the Taoist Abbot Wu of the Temple of the Jade Emperor:

The ostensible message of this verse is the passage of time and the need to become enlightened and so pass beyond time into the realm of the immutable. Here, as in Buddhism, the world of transitory phenomena (rüpa or se) is empty, ultimately devoid of significance. But given the range of meanings that the narrative has conditioned us to see, what does the insertion of this quatrain actually convey? Since the sexual metaphor is so prominent in Chinp’ingmei, we will be unable to avoid recalling it at any mention of se, and we have also been taught by verses like those above to think of se as the illusion produced by inveterate self-deception. Further, a variety of indications point to the death of both Li P’ing-erh and her son as retribution for the death of P’ing-erh’s first husband Hua Tzu-hsü, which she and Hsi-men Ch’ing brought about so that they might marry and she might enter the Hsi-men household. The self-deceived murderers Li P’ing-erh and Hsi-men Ch’ing have thus contributed to the extinction of the Hsi-men family line. This is the “emptiness” to which their ethically blind sexual desire has led.

This is an elaborate interpretation of a verse that might be passed over by the casual reader. Is it a case of overinterpretation? I think not. The author of Chinp’ingmei was fond enough of wordplay and hidden meanings that the layered significance in this use of se is consistent with his other verbal and metaphorical constructions. The retributive scheme that we have seen operating throughout the narrative dictates this interpretation of the terms se and k’ung (emptiness).

This retributive scheme is also our key to understanding the novel’s references to fate or t’ien-ming, which at first glance seem to diminish the notion of individual responsibility, rather than to emphasize it. A fair number of verses make statements like this one in Chapter 19:

Similarly, in Chapter 29 we read:

We have already seen that despite his stress on retribution, the author apparently placed little credence in the fate-calculation that these poems describe. Was he, then, revalorizing popular notions of fate or t’ien-ming, to make them stand for what he did believe? The conventional understanding of t’ien-ming seems to have oscillated between notions of a fate that was immutable and a fate that was manipulable: success or failure, longevity or brevity of life, were all determined by such things as the conjunctions of the stars - but elaborate prescriptions were nonetheless given for appealing the heavenly verdict. In fiction and drama, as we have observed, there was only one efficacious prescription, and that was to have Heaven observe you in an act of disinterested virtue. Nevertheless, even this prescription displays what Buddhists and Neo-Confucians called an “attachment” to success and longevity, since the heroes of tales and plays reap worldly rewards. Spiritual reward was not generally seen as sufficient to build a story on.

Serious Neo-Confucian thinkers of the Sung and Ming, however, went beyond conventional values in their discussion of fate, and spoke of fulfilling one’s destiny or ming rather than manipulating or even simply accepting it. They agreed with the conventional view that length of life or worldly success were matters foreordained by Heaven (t’ien), but these were not the natural endowments that interested them. What mattered to a philosopher like Wang Yang-ming was whether, within one’s allotted span, one chose to fulfill or to contravene one’s Heaven-endowed nature (equivalent to one’s Destiny or ming). This nature was understood as the particular aspect of the universal Way or Tao. T’ien-ming was thus a matter of the individual’s relation to the universal, and to the immutable, profoundly ethical laws of the universe.⁴²

This kind of thinking made its way into certain works of drama and fiction, since drama and fiction displayed a continuum of their own, from easy acceptance of conventional views to criticism or rejection of those views. The dramatist Li K’ai-hsien, for example, whose play Pao-chienchi (The Precious Sword) is quoted extensively in Chinp’ingmei, placed no value on conventional prognostication. Nevertheless the hero of Pao-chienchi has his fate read in Scene 3, and the knowledge of what Heaven has in store for him seems to give him courage for the acts of daring virtue that he has planned. The notion that “one’s lot in life is determined by ming alone” liberates him for action, freeing him from fears about (that is to say, from attachment to) life and death. The ultimate disposition of things is seen to depend on Heaven, and not on the machinations of man.

Such a view reflects what we know to have been Li K’ai-hsien’s Neo-Confucian erudition. In Chinp’ingmei, the references to t’ien-ming work to suggest that the anonymous author of the novel held similar views. The mechanical manipulation of fate does not work in Chinp’ingmei (Li P’ing-erh’s scriptures do not save her baby), and neither are we given examples of conventional heroes who alter their physiognomy or horoscopes by acts of virtue. What we see, instead, are a group of people who do not “fulfill their natures” in Neo-Confucian terms, and who therefore drop by the wayside as the universe unfolds.

The verses quoted above function ironically, in that we can see their full import while the characters cannot. Hsi-men Ch’ing and P’an Chin-lien are as skeptical about fate-calculation as Li K’ai-hsien himself (both Hsi-men Ch’ing and P’an Chin-lien observe that while you can tell people’s fortunes, you can never tell what they will actually do),⁴³ but they refuse to turn this clear vision on what they themselves do. Theirs is the novel’s typical sin of self-delusion, which Ming thinkers considered the great stumbling-block on the Way. As with the proverbial view of se, conventional ideas about t’ien-ming are thus expanded in Chinp’ingmei to take on the major moral issues of the late Ming.

The Mimetic Level of Chin p’ing mei

Given the way this author revalorizes convention, we should not be surprised that he also varies his mimetic level to make his points as tellingly as he can. When the author has Hsi-men Ch’ing’s penis eulogized at his funeral, for example, or has “unrealistically” critical songs sung at a banquet for corrupt officials, the effect is to startle the reader and cause reflection on what has just been read. These violations of “realism” are not accidents; they are essential to the author’s method in Chinp’ingmei. We are supposed to remember that Hsi-men Ch’ing’s sexual excesses led to his death, and we are supposed to stand apart with the author, joining in the songs that express his fury at corruption. There is not simply a single set of realistic “causes” operating in this work. Rather, we are always given two levels of causality operating at once: first, the “believable” reasons that grow out of the daily life of the family and society, and second, the ethical necessities of the author’s retributive scheme. As examples, let us consider why Hsi-men Ch’ing, Li P’ing-erh, and their son Kuan-ko “really” die.

The plot gives us easily comprehensible and fully adequate reasons for their deaths. Hsi-men Ch’ing, already exhausted, overexerts himself sexually (and takes a probably fatal dose of his aphrodisiac). Li P’ing-erh suffers a wasting disease whose course is carefully chronicled,⁴⁴ and the baby Kuan-ko is given a series of calculated shocks by the jealous P’an Chin-lien. Just as the author motivates his characters convincingly during their lifetimes, so he fulfills the demands of probability in describing their deaths.

But in the author’s view, why have they really died? It is clear that the author intends their deaths as punishment for crimes that are reprehensible not merely for their effect on the family, but for reasons that go beyond these individuals to the court and the whole of society. (Kuan-ko’s death is retribution for the sins of his parents: his mother dreams that her murdered husband Hua snatches the baby from her.) In order to bring this home to us, the author introduces “unrealistic” elements, including dreams and visions, that help make his view clear. While the novel is structured so that these visions can often be explained realistically, as deathbed remorse or as “what one is already thinking,”⁴⁵ they are sometimes introduced with patently “unrealistic” touches as well. In Chapter 71, Hsi-men Ch’ing finds the actual house he had seen in a dream of Li P’ing-erh. In Chapter 62, the Taoist exorcist P’an shares Li P’ing-erh’s deathbed visions of the murdered Hua Tzu-hsü. Since throughout the novel we are given fully adequate “realistic” explanations for the progress of events, there is no reason to suppose that the author is suddenly resorting to magical explanations at these points. (Late Ming revisions of drama show just the opposite trend.) Rather, it seems far more likely that he is playing with the convention of visions as we have seen him playing with proverbial wisdom, reminding us of the patients’ crimes as well as of the etiology of their diseases. By seeming to corroborate the visions they see, he can deepen our sense of the inevitability of the judgment they face. Through these and all of his other “unrealistic” interventions, the author strengthens his private bond with us so that we stand with him at certain points outside the narrative, catching the hidden meanings that go beyond mimesis, even as we observe the actions of characters who are consistent, convincing, and real.

But this observation, drawn from Wayne Booth’s discussion of narrators and implied authors,⁴⁶ raises some serious critical questions that have to do with the voice of the narrator in Chinp’ingmei.

The Author and the Narrator of Chin p’ing mei

As Patrick Hanan has pointed out, the simulated context of traditional hua-pen is virtually uniform, that of a storyteller speaking to an audience. The “magisterial” narrator possesses all information necessary to unravel ambiguities. He prophesies, and he metes out judgment. His failing is that since he hardly varies from story to story, and since he speaks in the conventional poems and tag-lines that move from text to text, he is unable to do justice to the particulars of any given plot.⁴⁷ Thus the reader will always be making allowances for the narrator. (Readers know the details of the story at hand, so they see beyond what the narrator is telling them.) But Hanan cautions us against any “close comparison with a modern, ironically conceived narrator,” and sees in the traditional hua-pen nothing like the self-conscious irony at the narrator’s expense that we might expect in modern fiction.⁴⁸

The problem is not with the organization of the stories themselves. The folly-and-consequences stories, in particular, are tightly constructed chains of causality whose unified vision is quite clear. The problem is an apparent lack of fit between the narrator’s conventional evaluations and the larger, more ramified moral universe that the story may suppose. As an example of this incongruity, Hanan notes that the closing poem to the fine hua-penChiangHsing-koch’ung-huichen-chushan (The Pearl-Sewn Shirt) is grossly inadequate to the character and actions of the woman at the center of the story. (She has been callously seduced and is overcome by remorse afterward, but the closing poem passes a very conventional judgment on her.)⁴⁹ We find similar kinds of incongruity in Chinp’ingmei. Sometimes, the narrator of Chinp’ingmei simply provides us with necessary information about one or another character; in this he is always reliable. Much of the rest of the time, however, he caps an incident by generalizing about whole classes of people - all women, all nuns - in ways that do not do justice to the incident itself. An example is the doggerel quotation that closes Chapter 37, after Hsi-men Ch’ing’s first adulterous encounter with his mistress Wang Liu-erh:

This is a conventional condemnation of an old woman matchmaker. But Wang Liu-erh will be an immediate cause of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s death, and that death is caused by violations of the fundamental values of the author’s society. The matchmaker who helps bring this adulterous affair about is thus a far more damaging figure than the conventional quotation would imply. And even where the author does not generalize, but offers a specific judgment on a specific event, his views may not reflect all the information available to the reader. In Chapter 11, for example, Hsi-men Ch’ing beats the fourth wife Sun Hsüeh-o for accusing P’an Chin-lien of murdering Wu Ta (P’an Chin-lien’s first husband), and the narrator rightly points out that Hsi-men Ch’ing is ignoring the fact that she did so.⁵⁰ But the reader - especially here, only six chapters after the event - remembers that Hsi-men Ch’ing was an accessory to the murder himself! The narrator’s judgment, condemning only P’an Chin-lien, is certainly inadequate to the case at hand.

Was the author aware of such inconsistencies? Did he exploit them on purpose, as later ironists like Ling Meng-ch’u (1580-1644) and Li Yü (1611-1679/80) were to do? These are important questions, since they bear on the probable aim of Chinp’ingmei as serious literature. If the author held the limited views expressed by his narrator, then the subtle commentary described above may well be a misreading. But there is little reason to suppose that he did hold the limited views of his narrator, given all the evidence to the contrary.

First we must remember that the conventional narrator of Chinese vernacular fiction was probably never taken at face value by his audience. “Seeing beyond” was a pleasure that had been associated with hua-pen long before members of the educated elite began to write them. The reader had always had to fit the significance of poem-chains or prologue stories to the significance of the main story. It was characteristic of the genre to make the audience cleverer than the teller, by providing the material necessary to do this.

But whether or not they took him at face value, late Ming readers of Chinp’ingmei expected the conventional narrator. He was a basic style-marker of vernacular fiction. The author of Chinp’ingmei was not likely to abandon what made the traditional narrator useful: the privilege to summarize, inform, and prophesy. Still, the relation of narrator to narrative in a novel is bound to be different from what it is in hua-pen. In a long and complex narrative, the cumulative weight of pattern and event can build into an effective foil for the conventional narrator, and that is the effect that I feel is achieved in Chinp’ingmei. The author gives us so much more information than his narrator admits to knowing that we cannot miss the difference, so it is difficult to imagine that the author was unaware of the difference himself. Certainly by the time we reach the fiction of Ling Meng-ch’u, a generation or so later, the self-conscious manipulation of the conventional narrator is very apparent. (Patrick Hanan has shown that Ling creates an individualized witty narrator whose conventional platitudes - when he descends to them - are clearly intended ironically.)⁵¹ The author of Chinp’ingmei wrote during a period soon to produce this kind of self-conscious irony, and the wide-ranging Chinp’ingmei must by its very virtuosity have helped to create that self-consciousness.

Moreover, the author of Chinp’ingmei displays an obviously self-conscious command of irony in his manipulation of several other traditional rhetorical devices. We have seen above how he plays with conventional description and commentary in Chapter 27, and we will see below how he does the same with the conventions of drama and song. He jokes with us by describing sexual activity in the language of epic battle, and even in straightforward narration he turns to new uses the parallel prose descriptions that conventionally retard the narrative and suspend the reader in a moment of contemplation of what has just been described. In the hands of lesser writers these conventionally elevated passages often simply show off the writer’s command of parallel prose, but in Chinp’ingmei they also serve to emphasize the folly of the characters whose behavior is incongruous with the tone of the description. We find a good example in Chapter 37, whose final quatrain we have already discussed above. Here Hsi-men Ch’ing first meets his mistress and is struck by her appearance. (In Chapter 37, Wang Liu-erh’s daughter Ai-chieh is chosen to be sent to the powerful Chai Ch’ien at the capital, and Hsi-men Ch’ing comes to inspect her.) When Wang Liu-erh enters the room, we are given a description of her person and clothing through Hsi-men Ch’ing’s eyes. The description is detailed, and it is presented flatly, almost baldly:

This detail builds toward the descriptive passage immediately following, in a manner precisely metaphorical for Hsi-men Ch’ing’s mounting excitement - as we may guess from the particular attention afforded her feet. The narrator then comments that “Indeed, though he had not yet understood her inner self, he saw the sleek beauty of her appearance.” The action is then suspended for the descriptive passage:

We understand from this suspension of the narrative that Hsi-men Ch’ing is briefly insensible to his surroundings, and when we remember that he is visiting on a matter of high importance to his own future position, and observe that once again, as so often, his sexual desires have made him at least momentarily oblivious to his situation, we understand the author’s intent in inserting this passage and find its elevated tone amusing. If it were simply a matter of describing attractive women in elegant language, Wang Liu-erh’s daughter might be allotted a descriptive passage of her own. But Hsi-men Ch’ing is not attracted to her, and so there is no need for one.

Given this author’s ability to turn conventional rhetoric to ends of his own, it seems safe to conjecture that his narrator does not speak for him, and that he is conscious of the narrator’s voice as separate from his own. But if the narrator’s judgments in Chinp’ingmei are restricted, that is not to say that they are wrong. Rather, they function much as the quoted hua-pen do in Chinp’ingmei: they raise issues of concern to the author, who then goes beyond convention in dealing with them. An example is the narrator’s comment on Hsi-men Ch’ing’s approaching death in Chapter 79, when he returns from a sexual bout with his mistress Wang Liu-erh to face the sexual demands of P’an Chin-lien, and is able to perform only after a massive dose of his aphrodisiac. He finally ejaculates semen, then blood, and finally cold air. Immediately following the description of this, the narrator says:

There follow two conventional verses on the danger of feminine charms, reminiscent of the lines on ch’ing and se that the author borrowed from Wen-chingyüan-yanghui to open the novel.

Now, since the sexual demands of women are the immediate cause of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s death, the last line of this passage is superficially apposite. As soon as we move to a wider context, however, we see that it cannot encompass his death after all. We have been repeatedly told through descriptions of his behavior, and through explicit commentary on that behavior, that Hsi-men Ch’ing is not an innocent victim of the charms that have destroyed him. Rather, he has brought their effects upon himself. (We have already learned that “Sex does not destroy men; men destroy themselves.”)

Moreover, since the empire is also implicated in the metaphorical dimension of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s sexual exhaustion (the imperial government also “overspends”), this passage of commentary recalls issues that the author has revalorized and made central to the traditional progression from person to family to state. The narrator’s judgment cannot be taken at face value, but neither can it be discarded.

The conventional narrator’s commentary is thus distinct from the implicit authorial commentary discussed here. The commentary of the implied author is to be found in the puns, allusions, and juxtapositions that seem to put us in touch with a structuring intelligence behind the book. In urging us to read Chinp’ingmei as though it were our own work, Chang Chu-p’o urges us to become, as far as possible, that structuring mind, and to participate in the heady pleasure of creation. But to “create” Chinp’ingmei as the author means us to do, we must now turn to its inclusion of drama and song, without which the novel would certainly not be what it is.