The Novel

by Steven Moore

  Easterngate is a scholar in his late 20s with lots of time on his hands—we never see him practicing his profession—which he spends having sex with both his wife and a younger, well-endowed scholar named Zhao Dali. Sensing an attraction between the two, Easterngate allows them to go to it one evening while he watches from outside, an epic fornication that in its pornographic excess recalls The Lord of Perfect Satisfaction (1520s), which is cited a few times and was an obvious model. Dali returns for another bout the next day, and like Hsi-men Ch’ing in PGV obtains some aphrodisiacs from a Buddhist and surreptitiously slips one into Jin’s cunt. (That’s the kind of diction the novel uses, coarse words with few attempts at poetic euphemism.) Another epic fornication follows, which also involves Jin’s two maids, but later Jin suffers from the aphrodisiac’s side effects. Easterngate nurses his wife back to health and together they decide to revenge themselves on Dali by seducing his widowed mother. A lesbian scene follows, then a bedtrick, then the deflowering of a maid named Little Pretty, and finally a reconciliation after which Dali is welcomed as a new husband for Jin while Easterngate takes the young widow. The older scholar hasn’t lost his taste for the younger scholar’s rump, so some outrageous three-ways ensue, and eventually everyone dies of sexual exhaustion except for Easterngate, who becomes a Buddhist monk and tells his scurrilous story to anyone who will listen, intended as “well-meaning advice for being good” (140).

  Like Scoffing Scholar, Lu cites the classics in ironically degrading circumstances, but the short novel lacks the longer novel’s equation of sexual excess with social decline. In fact the longest, most convincing passage in The Embroidered Couch is Jin’s exhortation to the widow not to waste her life in chastity (103–5), and Lu clearly intended his novel to be a celebration of sex, or at least a depiction of how some debauched scholars regarded sex in the liberal Lower Yangtze delta area of his time. It was popular with the literati during the rest of the Ming era, but once the puritanical Manchus came to power it was banned, and to this day The Embroidered Couch is shunned by conservative Chinese critics. It should be shunned by anyone lacking a strong stomach, for several of the sexual scenes are gratuitously disgusting.

  The erotic element of The Plum in the Golden Vase was likewise stripped from its sociopolitical context for Zhaoyang qushi (The Intriguing History of Zhaoyang Palace), written sometime before 1621 by the pseudonymous Guhang yanyan sheng, in which the fox-spirit Daji from Xu Zhonglin’s 16th-century novel Creation of the Gods is reborn as Hede, the sexually voracious concubine of Emperor Han Chengdi. After a series of sexual adventures, the vixen eventually kills the emperor via an overdose of aphrodisiacs, just as Chin-lien did with Hsi-men in PGV, but the untranslated novel sounds like merely a sensationalist exploitation of the sexual side of fox-spirit lore.5

  Such lore dominates The Sorcerer’s Revolt (Ping yao zhuan, 1620), a lively, 500-page novel by Feng Menglong (1574–1646), one of the most industrious writers of the 17th century. (A recent Chinese edition of his complete works takes up six feet of shelf-space.) A rich, well-read bohemian, he wrote folk songs, gambling handbooks, biographies of courtesans (with whom he was very popular), study guides, plays, jokebooks, histories, anthologies, and novels, of which The Sorcerer’s Revolt is the best known. It was based on an older novel called The Three Sui Quash the Demons’ Revolt—sui is an element in the names of the three characters who suppress the revolt—traditionally ascribed to Luo Guanzhong, author of the 14th-century classics Three Kingdoms and The Water Margin, though this is unlikely. It was probably written in the 15th century, and consisted of 20 chapters.6 Feng doubled its length by adding 15 chapters of backstory at the beginning and inserting five chapters of additional material throughout the rest.

  The Sorcerer’s Revolt is a supernatural retelling of a mutiny led in 1047 by an army officer who dabbled in sorcery named Wang Ze, which was quelled after 66 days by the imperial army. Feng magnifies this to cosmic proportions by starting his tale in the 8th century and introducing a white ape named Yuan Gong, who is obviously based on Monkey from The Journey to the West (c. 1580).7 Like Wu Chengen’s irascible simian, Yuan Gong is dissatisfied with his low position in the Jade Emperor’s heavenly palace and one day steals a Daoist spellbook, which he takes back to his earthly cave for further study. He begins to copy it onto the walls in order to share the secrets of heaven with mankind—there’s a touch of both Prometheus and Faust about him—but he manages to transcribe only two-thirds of it before the Thunder Lord bolts down from heaven and arrests the book thief. He is pardoned after he argues he had merely wanted to spread the Dao to others, not expose heaven’s secrets, so he is condemned to guard his cave against outsiders curious about the occult text on the wall.

  The narrator then jumps ahead two centuries to the year 998 and introduces the villainess of the piece, a fox-spirit known (in human form) as Holy Auntie; she and her two offspring—a crippled son named Chu and a nubile daughter named Mei—dominate the first quarter of the novel, an episodic romp through Chinese folklore and demonology that concludes with the proclamation of Holy Auntie as a living Buddha. Well-educated Feng Menglong drops enough hints that he is satirizing his countrymen’s uneducated belief in magic, reincarnation, and religion. “Truly, there must have been some pretty shallow minds about!” he sneers.8

  A monk born from an egg hears of the heavenly text in Yuan Gong’s cave, and over the course of the next few chapters he makes three attempts to read the “thunderscript,” which allows Feng to further satirize Chinese superstition and Buddhist hypocrisy. (Most of the Buddhists in the novel are hard-hearted and/or lecherous.) At chapter 16 we reach the beginning of the 15th-century version of the novel, which introduces various sorcerers and corrupt officials into the mix. Feng’s association of sorcerers with rebels gives them some appeal at first: the sorcerers Zhang Ying and Pu Ji kill a corrupt governor, which demonizes them in the eyes of the imperial government. Feng literalizes this by giving them magical powers; soon the rebels become as corrupt as the officials they overthrew, but Feng’s symbolic alignment of rebellion and heterodoxy with sorcery and magic adds an interesting twist to the historical record.

  The rebel Wang Ze is introduced in chapter 31, and the second half of the novel deals with his rise to power with the help of sorcerers (read sleazy political advisors), his descent into debauchery and tyranny, and his eventual defeat at the hands of the imperial army, all of it enlivened by magic, intrigue, and suspense. The immortal white ape from the beginning of the novel returns in chapter 37, and the imperial suppression of the rebels is likened to the desire of the Jade Emperor to restore order to the cosmos. Thus the historical Wang Ze’s two-month rebellion became in Feng’s hands a two-century epic battle between good and evil involving gods and mortals, a comic-book restatement of the grand Chinese/Daoist theme of the need for cosmic harmony between heaven and earth.

  Despite its lofty theme, the novel is very homely in its particulars. There are episodes dealing with shopkeepers, characters interrupted in the middle of sex, wedding ceremonies, burial rites, petty squabbles among monks, acts of seduction, the grind of poverty, political infighting, and mundane observations like “it really makes you mad the way waiters and shop assistants drag their feet when called” (10). All in all, it’s a much more realistic treatment of life than, say, Creation of the Gods, which The Sorcerer’s Revolt otherwise resembles. The dialogue is very natural, as is the narrative style; erudite Feng plays “your humble storyteller” (7) and frequently reminds readers of earlier plot-points to help them along. He was obviously writing for a popular audience, not the elite for whom complex novels like The Plum in the Golden Vase were written, and devoted the rest of his writing career to championing vernacular literature. The same year he published The Sorcerer’s Revolt he brought out Stories Old and New (Gujin xiaoshuo, 1620), the first of three huge anthologies that preserved China’s rich heritage of tales and short stories. (As he did with the novel, Feng often revised the older stories and cont
ributed about 35 of his own.) In the preface to Stories Old and New he makes no apology for abandoning “an elegant style that appealed to literary minds”:

  Now common ears outnumber literary minds in our world, and fiction draws less from the elegant than from the colloquial style. Just ask the storytellers to demonstrate in public their art of description: they will gladden you, astonish you, move you to sad tears, rouse you to song and dance; they will prompt you to draw a sword, bow in reverence, cut off a head, or donate money. The faint-hearted will be made brave, the debauched chaste, the unkind compassionate, the obtuse ashamed. One may well intone the Classic of Filial Piety [Xiaojing] and the Analects of Confucius every day, yet he will not be moved so quickly nor so profoundly as by these storytellers. Can anything less accessible achieve such effect?9

  To claim popular fiction is superior to the Confucian classics would have been ridiculous and heretical at any earlier time, and Feng Menglong’s spirited defense shows how confident in their art Chinese fiction writers had become by the 17th century.

  Confucianism is treated even more contemptuously in another long, supernatural novel that appeared a few years later, The Story of Han Xiangzi (Han Xiangzi quanzhuan, 1623) by Yang Erzeng, a scholar who ran two publishing houses in Hangzhou in the early years of the 17th century. (One of them was called the Hall of Purity in Poverty, a good name today for an idealistic small press.) After publishing a few successful books on Daoism, Yang decided to try his hand at a Daoist novel. Following Feng Menglong’s m.o., he found an old novella entitled The Story of Immortal Han (Han xian zhuan) and expanded it to a 30-chapter novel, drawing additional inspiration from a 16th-century play entitled Ascension to Immortality and from the many stories and ballads about a man who allegedly became immortal via Daoist “inner alchemy.” And like The Sorcerer’s Revolt, Han Xiangzi is set in the distant past, in this case in the middle of the Tang Dynasty, though it starts even earlier, as its English translator explains:

  The storyline begins in the Han dynasty [206 bce–220 ce], where Han Xiangzi’s previous incarnation is a beautiful but haughty woman, who is consequently reborn as a white crane. The crane cultivates himself and meets Zhongli Quan and Lü Dongbin. They deliver him to be reborn as the son of Han Yu’s elder brother Han Hui [in the year 780]. After Han Hui’s and his wife’s death, Han Xiangzi is raised in Han Yu’s household, where he is treated like a son (as he is the only male offspring of the Han family). Han Yu has great expectations of Han Xiangzi, but the latter follows his destiny and runs away from home to join his masters Zhongli Quan and Lü Dongbin in the Zhongnan Mountains. There he practices inner alchemy and becomes an immortal. The Jade Emperor sends him back to earth to deliver his uncle Han Yu, his aunt, and his wife, Lin Luying. After many failed attempts to break down Han Yu’s Confucian obstinacy, he delivers him at Blue Pass, and later does the same for his aunt and wife.10

  Han Xiangzi follows the structure of classic Chinese novels: each chapter has a two-part title (e.g., “Abandoning His Family Bonds, Xiangzi Cultivates Himself / A Transformed Beauty Tempts Xiangzi for the First Time”) and the novel falls into groups of 10: chapters 1–10 give us Xiangzi’s background, his attainment of immortality, and his return to “deliver” his Confucian uncle; 11–20 track his dozen attempts to wear down his uncle, who resists and eventually hits bottom during a snowstorm at Blue Pass; and 21–30 concern Xiangzi’s redemption of the rest of his extended family, all of whom turn out to be celestial beings who were banished to earth for some minor infraction. The ostensible purpose is to champion Daoism over superstitious Buddhism and worldly Confucianism.

  If it were no more than a didactic conversion story, Yang’s novel would have limited appeal. The plot is predictable even to the Westerner unfamiliar with the legends of Han Xiangzi, and the smarmy confidence of the born-again Daoist is as repulsive as that of any priggish hero of Christian hagiography. What puts the tang in this Tang-era novel are all the slurs against Daoists that Yang records with surprising frequency. The Daoist rejection of conventional life and its social obligations in favor of communing with nature and cultivating the inner self is dismissed by most of the novel’s characters as mere laziness and irresponsibility. Daoists are taunted for abandoning their wives and families, sleeping until noon, dressing funny, drinking wine and doing drugs—lots of pills are popped in this novel, and one Daoist instructress is known as the Hemp Maiden—for seducing pretty boys to join them, acting as pimps for their female acolytes, panhandling, reading occult books like The Yellow Court Scripture, “selling false medicines in the street” (5), spouting glib nonsense, and so on, as though they were a bunch of hippies or brainwashed cult members—which, given human nature, many probably were. And although Daoist principles are exalted, the actual practices of Daoists are reprehensible. “ ‘Masters,’ one character complains, “ ‘if you are divine immortals, why do you speak like extortionists?’ ” (28). Here’s how another character describes Xiangzi’s two immortal patrons:

  “If you are talking about that Zhongli,” replied the herdboy, “He’s a hot-tempered, covetous demon. He kills people without batting an eye. He is certainly no divine immortal!”

  “It would not happen to be Master Lü Dongbin?” Xiangzi then asked.

  The herdboy laughed and said, “Daoist Lü got drunk three times in the tower of Yueyang, played selfishly with White Peony [a courtesan], sold false ink in Dingzhou, and hawked poor combs in Xunyang. Every time, he used trickery to cheat people. He is even less a divine immortal than Zhongli.” (7)11

  Xiangzi in particular is an irritating gadfly, a habitual liar, and wreaks all sorts of havoc on his uncle and aunt in order to ruin them and thus soften them up for conversion. (He ignores his patient wife Luying from the beginning, refuses to sleep with her, abandons her, and “delivers” her last.) Han Yu, his uncle, is an especially good character—an upright official, devoted family man, a hero to his subjects, and a patron of literature—and so the hardships and mind-games his unfilial nephew inflicts on him create more sympathy for the principled Confucian than for the mystical Daoist.

  It could be that Yang Erzeng inserted all the anti-Daoist sentiments to expose the prejudices unenlightened people hold against these enlightened beings, but the relentless frequency with which Yang salts his text with references to “filthy” Daoists who engage in “frivolous trickery” works against that, especially in scenes like the following, in which Xiangzi deals drugs and deliverance to some citizens of Chang’an:

  Immediately the Daoist took on the exact appearance of Xiangzi. Mme. Dou [his aunt] said, “Do you think you can move me with your tricks?”

  “What if I delivered another person to accompany you in leaving the family?” Xiangzi said.

  “Who?” asked Mme. Dou.

  Xiangzi then scraped some black dirt from his armpit, mixed it with some mucus and saliva, and molded it into a big pellet. Holding it on his palm, he called out, “If there is anyone with the right affinity who will eat this magical drug of mine, I will deliver him to become an immortal.”

  Old Wo hurried forward, took it, and swallowed it in one piece. Right away clouds lifted up his feet and he floated in mid-air. (24)

  Of course, within the context of the novel, the Daoists are real immortals and everyone else is deluded, but to Yang’s Chinese readers who avoided itinerant Daoist bums in their own streets (as Americans used to dodge Hare Krishnas in airports), it was the Daoists who were “self-assured, stupid, and deluded” (29). As this scene shows, Yang likes to literalize concepts—his characters don’t simply “get high” but literally float away—and the arcane Daoist terminology he throws around (plagiarized in chunks from other books) can likewise be regarded as exotic hypostatizations of mundane activities like self-reflection and -discipline. At several points in the novel, the author records a group of people offering different interpretations of an event, probably a warning to readers to take care when interpreting his novel.

  Han Xiangzi isn’t a gr
eat novel, but there’s enough tension between its ostensible pro-Daoist theme and its anti-Daoist subtext to make it an interesting one. It starts off rather clumsily—as though Yang discovered, like many an editor after him, that it’s easier to publish a novel than to write one—and there are too many plot recapitulations and formulaic elements. (Both nephew and uncle are tested on their way to deliverance by seductive women.) But there is a raffish tone that one certainly doesn’t find in Christian conversion novels, some clever wordplay and symbolism, talking animals (always a treat), paintings that come alive, a descent to the underworld (one of many scenes inspired by The Journey to the West), many fine poems, and even singing: characters frequently break into song as though in a musical. There’s even a singing goat. And in Han Yu we have an example, rare in Chinese fiction, of an appointed official who actually works for the public good (until his insidious nephew convinces him to forsake public life).

  In 1627 the tyrannical eunuch Wei Zongxian died, and the following year a writer calling himself “The Chang’an Daoist” (Chang’an Daoren) published a lively, 40-chapter novel mocking the eunuch called Yin-yang Dreams to Caution the World (Jingshi yinyang meng). The first 30 chapters concern Wei’s “yang dream” in the real world, and the concluding 10 his “yin dream” in the underworld, where he is tortured along with his accomplices. The author is a character in the novel, and after witnessing the eunuch’s punishment is given a “long tongue” by an immortal to recount what he has seen. (The term usually referred to a yakking woman.) Although the novel expounds the Buddhist notion that life is a but a dream, the author’s “jesting, self-mockery, and self-reflexivity” suggests much more is afoot—it sounds like a Chinese version of Stanley Elkin’s Living End—but unfortunately the novel remains untranslated.12