“The Rhetoric of Chin p’ing mei”
Drama and Song:
The Conventions Undermined
The author of Chinp’ingmei must have loved drama and song, which he knew so well and used so fluently, but certain things suggest that he found them limited in diction, in characterization, and in the presentation of moral issues. This, after all, may be why he chose the relative freedom of the novel form. Here again Patrick Hanan’s caution is well-advised: just as we ought not to look for a “modern, ironically conceived narrator” in hua-pen literature, so we should not expect modern, consistent irony toward literary conventions in this late Ming novel. What we find, instead, are firm convictions about public and private morality, and these convictions, coupled with certain historical factors, seem to have dictated which conventions the author would choose to satirize.
The author seems not to have taken completely seriously every play with whose premises he agreed. Ch’uan-ch’i like Hsiang-nangchi and Shuang-chungchi dramatized resistance to misgovernment, and put politics in the moral framework of the Ta-hsüeh, but one can detect a certain irreverence in the way they are used in Chinp’ingmei. With their quotations from T’ang poetry and the classics, both plays were bywords for pedantry in certain late Ming circles. Certainly, despite the claims of their prologues, they had done nothing to reform the age. And as the author uses them in Chinp’ingmei, they do nothing to reform the Hsi-men family either. If Ts’ai Yun and Ts’ai Chiu, who call for these plays, represent the officials the author thought one might actually encounter, then the improbably virtuous heroes of Hsiang-nangchi and Shuang-chungchi may have struck him as irresponsible literary creations. The fact that the author’s contemporaries habitually criticized these works of drama may have encouraged him to quote the plays in contexts that implicitly call into question their moral pretensions.
The author’s satirical view seems particularly clear in certain allusions to Yü-huanchi, an expansion of the tsa-chüLiang-shihyin-yüan that was revised in an increasingly didactic fashion over the course of the Ming.1 Unlike Liang-shihyin-yüan, a scholar-beauty romance whose “emperor” is simply the dramatist’s way of resolving the plot, Yü-huanchi draws the dimensions of family and state into the lovers’ tale. In Yü-huanchi, the hero marries after leaving his beloved singing-girl, and the reincarnated singing-girl becomes his second wife only at the end of the play. In the intervening scenes the hero saves the emperor from a siege, and is rewarded with high office. He also saves his wife from the wrath of her father, who has tried to drown her because of tales brought by a malicious servant. A Wan-li version of this play contains the explicit statement that the father, as an official, cannot be expected to govern properly with his family in disorder,2 and the late Ming Liu-shihchungch’ü revision quotes the Ta-hsüeh with reference to family and state.3 This play was obviously dear to the author (he quotes it more than any other except Pao-chienchi), but there are hints that he found its presentation of moral issues inadequate. In Chapter 11, the aria describing the faithful singing-girl of the play is sung by the singing-girl Li Kuei-chieh, who is identified in the novel with inconstancy and incest.4 And in Chapter 36, as noted above, the bisexual servant Shu-t’ung sings the part of the hero’s chaste bride. Here as in other allusions to ch’uan-ch’i, the virtue of the dramatic characters reflects badly on the characters of the novel - but in these two instances the fit between novel and ch’uan-ch’i is preposterously bad. How are we to take the bride’s chastity completely seriously, when it is Shu-t’ung who sings her part, and sits on the visiting prizewinner’s lap? In this same chapter another venerable literary convention is being exploded, that of the examination prizewinner’s return home in glory. (We watch the destitute An Ch’en, deposed by Ts’ai Ching’s adopted son, borrow boat-passage from Hsi-men Ch’ing.) What the author objected to, it seems, were conventional resolutions of the problems that haunted his novel: official corruption, the fate of just censors, the abdication of familial or governmental responsibility. His own characters are overcome by the reality of these problems, for which the novel has no easy solutions.
Song is used in the novel to take similar advantage of the contrast between convention and what the author regarded as actuality. The popular songs quoted in Chinp’ingmei display a range of personae even more limited than what was found in drama. Since the author of Chinp’ingmei had unprecedented literary resources for the depiction of character, it seems unlikely that the emotions of his female characters are to be identified with these formulaic songs. It seems more likely that the songs are meant to remind us of the characters’ similarity to or distance from the conventional personae of the lyrics, just as in the case of allusion to drama. What P’an Chin-lien’s songs reveal, for example, is her delusion that she is an innocent victim, just like the lovesick maidens of legend or the conventional beauties of the stage. The author shapes a scene or two to fit her songs (when she sings of a love-charm in Chapter 8, she extends her “slender hand” to work just such a charm),5 but her subsequent behavior explodes the conventional resolution of such a scene. The “slender hand” she extends would be typical of a languishing beauty in a conventional poem, but such women were passive figures with none of P’an Chin-lien’s vituperative verbal resources. And by the following page Chin-lien is beating her stepdaughter, in an action highly uncharacteristic of the maidens of verse and song. In Chapter 38, Hsi-men Ch’ing himself mocks the conventions of these songs: when P’an Chin-lien is described in a conventional stanza as having wasted away in his absence, Hsi-men Ch’ing snatches her mirror and laughs that he has lost no weight at all!6 Similarly, Ying Po-chüeh mocks Li Kuei-chieh in Chapter 52, reminding her that her heart is not a bit broken, despite the words of her song.7 These songs distance the reader who is familiar with their conventions, and able to appreciate the contrast they make with the complexity of the narrative.8 The effect is similar to what is produced by a passage like this one, from Ulysses, in our own tradition:
The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the storm-tossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.9
This is the sentimental language that Joyce left Ireland to escape, and we hardly imagine that it expresses the consciousness of the author of Ulysses, with his mastery of styles and contrasts. Similarly, we must realize that P’an Chin-lien’s “slender hand,” her “leaning against the standing screen,” hardly represent realistic description to the author of Chinp’ingmei.10
From Hsi-men Ch’ing’s death to the end of the novel, the conventions of drama and song are used to produce incongruity so great that everything seems to be satirized - the novel’s characters and the conventions themselves. These are the chapters in which the pace of the novel quickens, the exhaustive presentation of the first eighty chapters giving way to a far terser mode of narration. Here the author ranges over the lives of a large cast of characters to display the final consequences of the misrule within the Hsi-men household. A number of distancing devices are used in these final chapters, and among them is the dramatic use of song on a greater scale than elsewhere in the novel.
We see this in Chapter 79, where the dying Hsi-men Ch’ing calls in his wives to offer them his parting instructions. He and his first wife Wu Yüeh-niang exchange the arias translated below.
Hsi-men Ch’ing said, “Do not weep; listen while I instruct you. There is a Chu-mat’ing that bears me out:
Do not grieve, virtuous wife, for I have sincere thoughts to tell you. Oh wife, whether the child you are carrying be male or female, raise it to adulthood. Protect the property of our household. Maintain your chaste resolve like the three paragons and the nine martyrs. My wife and my four concubines, take hands and remain united, that your virtues may illumine one another, as I lie in death beneath the Nine Springs, eyes and mouth forever closed.
Yüeh-niang heard this and replied, similarly:
Many thanks, oh husband, for leaving these excellent instructions to your wife. Husband, in my life with you I have followed the way of the three virtues and four principles of compliance prescribed for women, and in my whole life have done nothing foolish. In observing widowhood, would I disgrace your name? In life and death, we follow the same path. I need no reminder to stay with my one saddle and one horse.11
When we recall that Hsi-men Ch’ing is dying with an enormously and painfully distended penis, and when we recall Wu Yüeh-niang’s jealousy and credulity, it is difficult to take this as a sincere evocation of emotion. The arias are highly conventional, and the personae they evoke are the paragons of drama. They are preposterous at this point in Chinp’ingmei: it is as though the author had thrown up his hands at the obstinate misbehavior of his subjects.
In Chapters 82 and 83, P’an Chin-lien and Ch’en Ching-chi sing to each other and write each other notes in the form of tsa-chü arias.12 P’an Chin-lien sings to her maid Ch’un-mei as well. The plot mimics the tsa-chüLiu-hsiehchi, when P’an Chin-lien finds Ch’en Ching-chi in a drunken sleep at their trysting place, and leaves a token to shame him.13 There is also quotation from and imitation of Hsi-hsiangchi. (In these two chapters, P’an Chin-lien and Ch’en Ching-chi consummate their desires behind the mistress’s back, abetted by Ch’un-mei, who thus acts the part of a Hung-niang. Part of Ch’un-mei’s dialogue is taken from Hsi-hsiangchi.) Hsi-hsiangchi has been used throughout the novel to suggest illicit sexual and governmental behavior, but here in Chinp’ingmei the play pales beside the reality of the incestuous lovers. The tables are turned, as the novel points up the insubstantiality of this charming play. And the whole incident casts a light back on the deathbed duet of Chapter 79. If the household can degenerate to such a state, what are we to make of Wu Yüeh-niang’s vows?
However great his love for the drama, the author of Chinp’ingmei poked gentle fun at it when doing so would deepen the frightening reality of his own tale. And there were certain plays and songs with which he simply seems to have disagreed. Unlike the lighthearted romances we have examined so far, these plays and songs could be taken as statements of convictions antithetical to his own.
The plays and songs with which the author disagreed enact two conventional situations in Ming drama: that of the virtuous singing-girl longing to quit her present life, and that of ascension to the Taoist paradise (a form of the traditional Taoist quest for immortality). The singing-girls of drama had been longing intermittently for virtue since the Yüan (we see this in the first song of Liang-shihyin-yüan, for example),14 and the notion of purification and return to paradise can be found in both Yüan and Ming tsa-chü. By the Ming, steadfastness and adherence to principle were probably more important to writers of these “Taoist” tsa-chü than was immortality as such: the notion of purification could be used metaphorically, and we need not assume that literati authors took it at face value. But wherever the author of Chinp’ingmei quoted plays of this sort, he seems to have wanted to criticize their manifest content (the ideal of renunciation), and to couple it with impropriety.
The early Ming tsa-chüPan-yehch’ao-yüan (Enlightenment at Midnight), performed for the Hsi-men wives in Chapter 78, can be used to illustrate all of these assertions. This is another tsa-chü by Chu Yu-tun (1379-1439), a grandson of the founder of the Ming dynasty, who was also the author of T’a-hsüehhsün-mei. In Pan-yehch’ao-yüan, Chu Yu-tun combines the theme of the virtuous singing-girl with that of the Taoist quest: he has the widowed heroine refuse the brothel life, and turn to the Taoist practices that lead her back to Paradise. (Like the lovers Chin-t’ung and Yü-nü, whom we have met above in the framing-tale to Liang-shihyin-yüan, she has been sent to earth to exorcise her remaining sexual desire.) Like T’a-hsüehhsün-mei, Pan-yehch’ao-yüan opposes a realm of ascetic purity to the gross sensuality of the entertainers, and like the didactic Ming ch’uan-ch’i discussed above, it treats the refusal to remarry as praiseworthy adherence to principle. This aspect of the plot is summarized in a prologue which observes that despite her lowly status as a singing-girl, the heroine is thoroughly chaste and capable of keeping her vows. How much more, then, says the writer, ought women of good family to be able to do so. His aim is to disseminate her tale as an example, and not simply to spread a licentious story.
Songs about prostitutes who long to reform are quoted in Chinp’ingmei before Chapter 78, but they have reformed nobody.15 Those in the novel whom nature or society has formed to be inconstant will remain inconstant: P’an Chin-lien (educated as a singing-girl) will sleep with her son-in-law, and the third wife Li Chiao-erh will return to the brothel as soon as Hsi-men Ch’ing dies. Li Kuei-chieh will sleep with Hsi-men Ch’ing’s adopted son Wang San-kuan. Far from lamenting when forced to take new lovers, the singing-girls in Chinp’ingmei take them under their patrons’ noses. The behavior of wives and singing-girls in Chinp’ingmei sends up the notion of the whore with the heart of gold.
The motif of the virtuous singing-girl is nevertheless useful to the author of Chinp’ingmei, since by structuring his novel to mock this motif, he can mock the men whom he has implicitly compared to prostitutes. The consistent lament of the virtuous singing-girl is that she is forced to break off with one lover only to take another, and by casting doubt on the sincerity of this lament, the author probes the hypocrisy of the officials he condemns. Just as the singing-girls do in fact move from one lover to another, so the officials are shown as devoid of any abiding dedication to principle. Chapter 78, in which Pan-yehch’ao-yüan is performed, carries forward the motifs of corruption and impropriety first at the level of state (in its mention of corrupt appointments), second, among the masters of the household (as Hsi-men Ch’ing sleeps with the wife of an employee), and finally among the servants (as Tai-an does the same). The author of Chinp’ingmei thus uses Pan-yehch’ao-yüan in a structure of metaphor quite different from Chu Yu-tun’s. Chu makes his Taoist heroine a metaphor for principle and incorruptibility, while the author of Chinp’ingmei explodes the notion of the virtuous singing-girl, as part of his condemnation of opportunism.
The author of Chinp’ingmei is unable to accept Chu Yu-tun’s structure of metaphor, because he demands rectification from his readers, not renunciation. He uses Pan-yehch’ao-yüan to point up Wu Yüeh-niang’s credulity, just as he has done with his quotation of pao-chüan: Yüeh-niang watches this drama of supposed transcendence while ignoring the improprieties that surround her in Chapter 78. (Hsi-men Ch’ing commits multiple adulteries in this chapter, and covets the wife of a colleague.) The other “Taoist” plays and tales in the novel - Sheng-hsienhui (Becoming an Immortal), Chin-t’ungYü-nü (Chin-t’ung and Yü-nü), and Lan-kuanchi (The Incident at Lan-kuan) - are presented similarly. (All are “deliverance plays,” or tales of ascension to Paradise.)16 They are performed for the eunuchs who epitomize official corruption and its resultant sterility. Another dramatic allusion emphasizes the stupidity of these eunuchs: they are shown watching the skit WangPoyüan-pen, about a foolish official deceived into thinking he has found the T’ang poet Wang Po (647-675).17 The constant association of “Taoist” tales and plays with these foolish eunuchs helps to undermine the ideal of renunciation as far as this novel is concerned. Only the deluded or corrupt in Chinp’ingmei believe in the virtue of singing-girls, or in the value of quitting this earthly life.
This is not to say, however, that the author had no use at all for the ideals of these plays. Their asexual Taoist paradise was a sterile heaven that had no place in his Confucian morality, but the impermanence of earthly pleasures was a notion that he could revalorize in a positive way. It served him as a kind of memento mori, reminding the reader that corruptanddeluded pleasures were impermanent, and that the only permanence lay in the eternal order beyond them. Such a memento mori contains the implicit injunction to put oneself in harmony with that eternal order. As far as this novel is concerned, that eternal order is the structure of impartial justice and retribution characteristic of Ming fiction, and much more closely related to this-worldly Confucian ethics than to transcendence or renunciation. For the officials and their families (as even those who sought the unity of the Three Teachings generally believed), this meant shouldering the Confucian responsibilities of family and official life.
Fortunately for an author who so loved the drama, plays existed that could help him to make exactly this point. Many Chia-ching and Wan-li plays were (or were thought to be) responses to contemporary political scandals. These plays all made reference to the same list of governmental sins, complaining that those who remonstrated justly were subject to demotion or banishment, that evil ministers held the reins of state, and that the corrupt were becoming wealthy while the virtuous subsisted in penury. These sins are familiar to us from the tradition of the “bad last ruler,” and they are central to Shui-huchuan as well. The play that our author selected to underscore his convictions was Li K’ai-hsien’s Pao-chienchi, a ch’uan-ch’i that contemporaries took as a statement of Ming outrage, despite its Sung setting.18 Like Chinp’ingmei, Pao-chienchi expands an episode from Shui-huchuan; and like Chinp’ingmei, it revalorizes and shifts the emphases of that incident to fit a new moral context. The play’s hero and his wife and servant may appear no less improbably virtuous to us than do the protagonists of plays like Hsiang-nangchi, but the significance of Pao-chienchi for Wan-li audiences was quite different from that of the pedantic Hsiang-nangchi. No longer the dead voice of the past, Pao-chienchi was taken as a living articulation of contemporary grievances.
The Conventions Accepted: Confucian Responsibilities
Chinp’ingmei quotes more extensively from Pao-chienchi than from any other dramatic source. The play is never named, but as we shall see below, each substantive quotation from Pao-chienchi appears at a critical moment in Chin p’ingmei, a moment when the fundamental themes of the novel come together. The reason for this, I believe, is that Pao-chienchi transmutes Shui-huchuan material so as to make political and ethical arguments that correspond closely to those of Chinp’ingmei.
The plot of Pao-chienchi is based on an early episode in Shui-huchuan, where the military official Lin Ch’ung suffers reverses at the hands of the Minister of War, Kao Ch’iu, and joins the legendary Shui-hu outlaw band at Liang-shan P’o.19 In Shui-huchuan, Lin Ch’ung is a low-ranking official who flies into a rage when Kao Ch’iu’s adopted son attempts to seduce his wife. Banished through a stratagem of Kao Ch’iu’s, Lin runs into further trouble when Kao Ch’iu’s adopted son arranges to have him falsely charged with setting fire to military stores. Lin kills the actual arsonists, and flees to join the outlaws, who will later be led by the famous Sung Chiang. Lin’s is the first of many such tales in Shui-huchuan, as Sung Chiang’s band of 108 is slowly assembled. Eventually the outlaws will be converted to the Emperor’s cause, and will help to subdue the rebel Fang La (d.1121).
In Pao-chienchi, however, the campaign against Fang La has already been waged before the play begins. Lin Ch’ung has reached high military rank, but after warning the emperor about the growing influence of “small men” in government, he has been slandered and demoted. Sadly regarding the jewelled sword (pao-chien) that gives the play its name, he expresses his fear that to memorialize the emperor again, as he desires to do, would subject his aged mother to danger, constituting a breach of filial piety. He is concerned that evil ministers are diverting the emperor from appropriate concerns by encouraging him to collect rare plants and stones, and to dally with his favorite concubine. The people are suffering, and border troubles are on the increase. When Lin does bring these concerns to the emperor’s attention, the minister Kao Ch’iu has him banished. When Kao’s son approaches Lin’s wife, the wife escapes with the help of her maid. Lin’s entrapment and his flight to the rebels proceed much as they do in Shui-huchuan (except that Sung Chiang already leads the band when Lin arrives), but in a departure from the novel, Lin is reunited with his wife at the end of the play, and given imperial permission to behead Kao Ch’iu.
The initial differences between Pao-chienchi and Shui-huchuan - the setting of the action after the Fang La campaign, and Kao P’eng’s attraction to Lin’s wife only after Lin’s banishment - change the nature of their quarrel from personal to political. Other plot changes contribute similarly to the demonstration of Li K’ai-hsien’s concerns. Lin Ch’ung’s willingness to bribe his jailers in Shui-huchuan - how else is he to live? - is changed to steadfast refusal in Pao-chienchi, and Sung Chiang is already present at the outlaws’ lair so that Lin Ch’ung can meet a suitably eminent interlocutor for a discussion of the affairs of the dynasty. Sung and Lin list the just officials who have been forced to leave the court. Most are historical figures who did suffer this fate under the last Northern Sung emperor, but Li K’ai-hsien also includes the revered Sung philosophers Ch’eng Hao (1032-1085) and Ch’eng I (1033-1107), who left earlier courts for different reasons. This flight of fancy emphasizes Li’s point that men of principle are being driven from their posts, and the cornerstone of Ming morality (the teachings of the Ch’eng brothers) is being undermined. Li K’ai-hsien has Lin’s family suffer for their principles: Lin’s mother dies, and his wife’s maid hangs herself to preserve her chastity, after helping her mistress to escape. Li K’ai-hsien thus took the premises of Shui-huchuan a step further, making explicit the virtues of loyalty (chung) and righteousness (i) that many saw as central to that work. (One of its earliest titles was Chung-ishui-huchuan.)20 Li K’ai-hsien may have written Pao-chienchi not simply out of a general anger at corruption, but also as a response to his personal situation: he was apparently a vigorous, enthusiastic, and honest civil servant, and he rose to high rank in the Ministry of Rites, but was forced by court intrigue to resign.21 Li K’ai-hsien’s own comments on Pao-chienchi are mainly boasts about his prosody (he was a very vain playwright),22 but a contemporary preface compares him to heroes of old, forced to vent his frustration in song when denied the opportunity to act.23
The way Pao-chienchi is used in Chinp’ingmei suggests that our author agreed with this reading of the play. Songs from Pao-chienchi are quoted in Chapter 70, where they are used to excoriate the officials who single Hsi-men Ch’ing out for praise. Songs and dialogue from Pao-chienchi are also quoted in Chapters 61 and 79, where we are reminded of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s excesses and his approaching death.
In Chapter 61, Hsi-men Ch’ing returns from an exhausting tryst with his mistress Wang Liu-erh, and can make love to P’an Chin-lien only after consuming an enormous dose of his aphrodisiac. He has first approached his beloved sixth wife Li P’ing-erh, but she is ill and sends him away; the next day doctors are called in to treat her. Three doctors give reasonable but ineffectual prescriptions, and finally a Dr. Chao is announced, whose comic dialogue and absurd diagnoses are taken from Scene 28 of Pao-chienchi. In the play, Dr. Chao treats the lovesick son of Kao Ch’iu; the absurdity of his diagnoses is meant to show us that lovesickness is not amenable to medical treatment. The medicine he prescribes in the play is fatal, but what good would it be, asks the doctor, if it did not kill such a scoundrel? In the novel, the characters comment that Dr. Chao’s medicine is “bitter,” and he replies that only bitter medicine can be effective. Like Kao P’eng, Li P’ing-erh is dying of her unbridled affections, which had she held them in check would have kept her out of the household altogether: this would have been bitter medicine indeed, and neither she nor Hsi-men Ch’ing has ever been inclined to take it. Cures in traditional Chinese medicine involve aligning oneself with cosmic principles, and the absurdity of Dr. Chao’s diagnoses reminds us here that Li P’ing-erh and Hsi-men Ch’ing are hopelessly at odds with those principles. The soothsayer Huang (the sort of disinterested figure who always makes accurate predictions in Chinp’ingmei) closes the chapter by announcing that her case is hopeless.
This prediction has an exact parallel in Chapter 79, when Hsi-men Ch’ing dies after a troop of doctors try equally unsuccessfully to prescribe for him. In Chapter 79, the soothsayer Wu uses language from Scene 10 of Pao-chienchi to inform Wu Yüeh-niang that her husband is doomed. It is in Scene 10 of the play that Li K’ai-hsien revalorizes popular notions of fate to free his hero for heroic action: if Heaven’s purpose is fixed, then Lin Ch’ung can turn directly to action in line with that purpose; he need not stop to have scriptures recited or charms performed. Here in Chinp’ingmei Heaven’s purpose is equally fixed, and the charms that Wu Yüeh-niang anxiously offers to have recited can be of no avail. The other striking parallel between Chapters 61 and 79 is in their openings: in both, Hsi-men Ch’ing exhausts himself with his mistress and must take an enormous dose of his “medicine” to perform with P’an Chin-lien. By Chapter 79, the combination of aphrodisiac and sexual activity prove fatal.
In Chapters 67 and 70, songs are quoted from Pao-chienchi. The exhausted Hsi-men Ch’ing plays drinking games with his friends in Chapter 67, to the accompaniment of songs from Scene 23 of the play.24 These songs show Lin Ch’ung on patrol in the snow, during his banishment. The Hsi-men household is deep in snow as these songs are quoted, and the songs are filled with images of snow. For Lin Ch’ung, this represents the nadir of his career, the point from which he cannot help but rise. For Hsi-men Ch’ing, whose career is just reaching the zenith, these images of snow are a reminder of the cold to follow. In Chapter 70, Hsi-men Ch’ing travels through snow to the court to receive a promotion; this is the chapter in which songs from Scenes 3 and 50 of Pao-chienchi, condemning Kao Ch’iu, form the entertainment at a banquet for the minister Chu Mien.25 This is an implausible moment for such a performance, but the songs fit perfectly the novel’s outrage at corrupt officials like Chu Mien.26
Two other plays keep the novel’s concern with government before us: Lo Kuan-chung’s tsa-chüFeng-yünhui (The Meeting in Wind and Clouds), about the virtuous founder of the Sung dynasty, and the anonymous Yüan tsa-chüChao-shihku-erh (The Orphan of the Chao Family). Feng-yünhui is quoted in Chapter 71, as Hsi-men Ch’ing prepares to return home from the sea of corruption that the Sung capital has become.27 Chao-shihku-erh shapes the plot of Chinp’ingmei in Chapter 59, as P’an Chin-lien murders Li P’ing-erh’s baby by means of a strategem drawn from the play.28 Chao-shih ku-erh remained highly popular during the Ming; this tale of an orphan’s vengeance on the corrupt minister who has murdered his parents was recast in the Southern mode, as the ch’uan-ch’iPa-i chi.29 P’an Chin-lien’s strategem recalls this tale of court vengeance, reminding us of the larger significance of the Hsi-men household.
Chao-shihku-erh suggests the retribution awaiting P’an Chin-lien, and Feng-yünhui points up the official corruption of Hsi-men Ch’ing and his eunuch host. Allusion to Pao-chienchi goes a step further: here the author seems to use the play to lament the fate of the empire in his own voice. These three plays, it seems to me, are used with the least discrepancy of scale of all the literary allusions in Chinp’ingmei. Here there is no suggestion that the plays state their meaning in too restricted a fashion: rather, they make statements that the author is able to appropriate as his own. This is quite different from the preposterous effect produced when P’an Chin-lien and Ch’en Ching-chi sing to each other as tsa-chü lovers. Romantic comedy cannot really contain the exasperated violence of P’an Chin-lien’s emotions; it takes a tale of vengeance like Chao-shihku-erh to remind us of the corrosive power of the Hsi-men household, which stands for forces that destroy individuals and threaten the state. This sort of distinction, between plays that the author satirized and those he did not, can help us to understand the use of literary conventions in the novel’s final chapter.
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