by Pu Songling
The attributions that Pu assigns generally reflect one or both of two designating characteristics: they employ explicit cues (notated in modern editions with quotation marks) to signify verbatim reporting of a tale or anecdote, most likely taken from the letters he mentions in his preface, and/or they function primarily to denote the breadth of the circle of his acquaintances, ranging from humble scholars to individuals in prestige positions of responsibility/respectability. Among the stories in this volume that contain explicit source attribution, for example, are “The Wooden Beauty” (mudiao meiren), which consists entirely of the first-person testimony of a businessman named Bai Yougong; “The Flow of Money” (qian liu), which recounts in urban legend style an eyewitness account that a man named Liu Zongyu reports having heard from a servant; Pu notes that he heard the story of the Ming scholar “Liu Liangcai” (liu liangcai) from a man named Huai Liren, from Jinan; the final sentence of “Seventh Sister Xiao” (xiao qi) is the attribution that “Dong Yufa told me all about this.” Showing evidence of both designating characteristics, “Dragon Meat” (long rou) quotes the words of court historian Jiang Yuxuan, though Pu is careful in it not to cite any first-person pronouns or references. He provides the first three sentences of the tale as verbatim comments from Jiang, while he paraphrases the portion asserting that Jiang himself has tasted dragon meat. This seems to reflect a sense of courtesy (or a politic propriety) on Pu’s part, but it also raises the question of whether the authors of other letters reporting strange phenomena might have requested that he not identify them by name as the individuals reporting details. And since the majority of Pu’s most elaborate narratives are neither presented verbatim nor attributed to specific individuals, one wonders whether similar requests might have been made by individuals who reported their accounts verbally to him.4
Those attributions that denote Pu’s associations with admirable individuals also seem to perform the related subsidiary service of facilitating subtle self-promotion. In “A Fox Dream” (hu meng), his friend, Bi Yi’an, finds that after reading Pu’s story “Qingfeng” (see 1:160-8), about a fox, “he’d often looked forward very much to meeting one of them.” After Bi does meet a fox girl, she finally asks him how he thinks she compares with Qingfeng:
“You pretty much exceed her,” he replied.
“I’m afraid I’m no match for her,” she told him. “But Liaozhai and you are literary friends, so please trouble him to write a biographical sketch of me, for if not, in a thousand years no one will love and remember me as you do.”
Perhaps this is merely Pu’s testament to Bi’s own imagination—as he records the precise date of Bi’s recounting of the story, and then remarks to his friend, “A fox like this would bring honor to Liaozhai’s writings”— but it certainly also expresses the literary ambition of creating a work that would last “a thousand years.”
The connection between the stories “The Respectful God” (shang xian) and “Jingshan the Monkey” (hou jingshan) advances the objective of self-promotion while also providing an element of professional rationalization. The former features Pu’s friend, Gao Jiwen, who like Pu Songling was never appointed to an official position; yet Jiwen’s uncle, Gao Heng, was a prominent public figure who held a number of influential imperial appointments in his career. When Jiwen falls sick while traveling with Pu, two male Gao relatives, including Jiwen’s uncle, Gao Heng, go to visit a fox fairy who’s reputed to be a healer, to secure medicine for him. The incident brings Pu into contact with the eminent Gao Heng, and hence it is that he can presume to write to him, soliciting any extraordinary accounts he might have to offer. Thus he opens “Jingshan the Monkey” with a direct quote from Gao Heng, identified as “Minister of Personnel,” to preface the tale of a Ming dynasty-era encounter between Gao’s grandfather and the “monkey immortal who went by the name of Jingshan.” There can be little doubt that it was both impressive to others and personally satisfying for Pu to include such a notable figure as one of his respondents.5
While he ordinarily appears “merely as an eyewitness, listener, or recorder” in the stories where he inserts himself as a first-person narrator (Zeitlin 132), Pu Songling’s talent for artistic invention is unambiguously displayed in “The Crimson Princess” (jiang fei), where he becomes the hybrid protagonist that so many of his stories champion: the scholar as hero. Pu reports that in a dream he had sometime in 1683-84, the title’s princess, who identifies herself as “the goddess of flowers,” summoned him to draft a “call to arms for all the plants to join together” in opposing their traditional enemy, the wind (also a feminized deity). After modestly agreeing to do so, and in the intimidating presence of “a number of individuals crowded together behind me to look over my shoulder,” he composes the document that represents two-thirds of the entire story (claiming that “Although I’ve forgotten the majority of the words I wrote for the call to arms, here are enough to suggest the substance of the full document”). Playing on the word for wind, feng, Pu includes an exhaustive list of the wind’s crimes against plants and humans, addressing the manuscript “to the Feng clan,” employing similes, metaphors, and a cornucopia of allusions to other writers, historical figures, folkloric beliefs, and mythic characters. Through all of it, he maintains the tone of a martial manifesto directed against an oppressive enemy, concluding that once the green world unites, “They will extinguish the wind’s arrogance, and for a thousand years, the injustices that she has done the flowers will be cleared away; her tyranny will be destroyed, dispelling forever the sound of the wind’s anger!” Besides celebrating Pu’s cleverness, the dream narrative also functions as canny praise of his employer, Bi Jiyou, since the adventure was inspired while Pu was lodging at Capacious Hall, property belonging to Bi.
Noting that ghost stories, and supernatural tales generally, often reflect “society’s dirty secrets” in their accounts of “injustice and inequality,” Patricia Sawin also observes that they can also be read as empowerment narratives, tools for addressing the “intolerable stresses” of life, particularly vis-à-vis one’s attempts to accept the fact of having to serve—or to be made to feel inferior to—individuals who are “less hardworking and moral” than the storyteller (99, 134). Pu Songling’s strange tales operate on similarly metaphorical and literal levels. Whether employing allegory, fable, or parable as the vehicles for his moral lessons, Pu “was determined to expose all official abuses he knew of and to lash out at social injustice without reservation” (Chang and Chang 116), using his stories as the vehicles to right wrongs, even if only figuratively, since he was denied the authority of a public official that would have allowed him to carry out reforms personally. Thus he recognizes the equalizing power of narratives involving the extraordinary and the weird, where he can create worlds in which positive qualities are rewarded and wickedness is punished, where worthy scholars can demonstrate their worth despite challenges like poverty, or successfully resist powerful though corrupt individuals. Ultimately, however, the driving force behind Pu’s collection of stories is his sincere devotion to the aesthetic of strangeness itself, to valuing what is uncanny and inexplicable. And reminding us that reading enables us to participate in what cannot be explained, and may only be experienced in our individual imaginations, is perhaps the greatest personal legacy left to us by the collector of these strange tales.
Notes
1 See the discussion of motives behind Pu Songling’s ambivalent withdrawal from the position of author in the volume one essay, “The Mystery of the Disappearing Artist: Pu Songling’s Voice and Persona in the Stories” (xi-xxii). That there is reason to suspect something other than simple modesty at work here is perhaps most persuasively demonstrated in the assessment of Chun-shu Chang and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang that Pu is possibly the most prolific writer in Chinese literary history: they attribute to him 1,295 poems, 119 song lyrics, 20 musical dramas, 100 folk songs, 524 essays, 15 encyclopedias and handbooks, and 500 short stories (1).
2 Lanciotti notes that Pu
completed the collection in 1679, but continued revising them for years, adding that the first known printing, dated 1766, was “based on a manuscript copy owned by the prefect Zhao Qigao” (72), with critical notes appended by Pu’s poet friend, Wang Shizhen.
3 Moreover, the very fact that Pu’s stories refer to specific witnesses, or to specific participants in the events described in the stories, “encapsulates the stories as credible accounts” (Hammond 208).
4 This consequently raises the possibility of selective amnesia on Pu’s part (or ascription of it to others), to protect the anonymity of his sources who request it. This could account for certain vague references—as at the end of “Two Separations by War” (luanli erze), when Pu equivocally refers to his source, and to a character in the story, an official responsible for dealing with production and distribution of salt, by noting that “It’s a pity that the storyteller has forgotten his name, though maybe someone in Shaanxi can recall it.”
On the other hand, there are also stories that make one wonder why the individual being cited didn’t request anonymity. In “Yama, the Hell King” (yanluo), a fellow Shandong resident, Xu Gongxing, informs Pu that “there were nights when he became Yama, the Hell King.” Xu additionally reports a brief exchange of conversation with a scholar named Ma, who also supposedly moonlighted as Yama. While it is a convention of the Hell King’s mythology for mortals to be called upon occasionally for such duty (see “Justice After Death: Pu Songling and the Tradition of the Hell King” [2:xxvi]), it seems either extremely prideful—or unbalanced—to disclose this, even to a “collector of strange tales.”
5 Attributions in the stories may also operate as rationalization for his failure to achieve a more prominent public status. The story of “Scholar Qin” (qin sheng) describes the miraculous resuscitation, by a fox immortal, of the title’s scholar, who dies after drinking poisoned wine. If intertextuality is a sort of synthesis between elements recognized in some preexisting, external text, and the details in a text that a writer is creating, and metatextuality is a commentary on some preexisting, external text, then hypertextuality, according to Gérard Genette, is an extension, or elaboration, of that external, preexisting text (10-12). In an example of hypertextual extension within “Scholar Qin,” then, Pu opens a new narrative, as the second half of the story, with the words, “I was a friend of Qiu Xingsu, a successful civil service examination candidate who was addicted to wine.” The “friend” descriptor makes Pu sound sympathetic, but the narrative tells how Qiu was so desperate for wine that when he’d finished all of it in the house, he subsequently drained the family’s store of vinegar (allowing Pu to connect the two halves of the story by declaring that vinegar, like poisoned wine, “can be passed around, too”). Qiu Xingsu may have been more publicly successful than Pu, but the author portrays him as a pathetic alcoholic.
II. A Healthy Respect for Higher Powers: Venerated Entities in Pu Songling’s Tales
The spiritual world of Pu Songling’s tales seems to have much more in common with the heavily-populated ancient pantheons of Greece, Rome, Northern Europe, and Mesopotamia, than with the monotheistic cultures of the West in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Undoubtedly this is related to China’s traditionally agrarian culture, as veneration of local deities and benevolent spirits reinforced the people’s sense of place and kept them connected to the land. The invention of agriculture itself is credited to four deities: Houji (the God of Grains), Houtu (the God of the Earth), Shennong (the Divine Husbandman), and Shujun (the God of Tilling), who collectively “started the technologies of sowing and cultivating, and invented a variety of farm tools” (Yang and An 70). The first two of the four appear in The Classic of Mountains and Seas (shanhai jing), an important mythological sourcebook assembled between the third century B.C.E. and the first centuries C.E., and sometimes attributed to Han dynasty court historian and archivist Liu Xin. It lists the greatest number of mythical figures of all ancient Chinese classical texts, including altogether 204 “greater and lesser deities, demigods, and suprahuman figures, both male and female” (Birrell xxiii). It would be a mistake to infer from this that the Chinese veneration of a wide variety of entities is simply a matter of cultural primitivism or superstition. Quite the opposite: as early as the Han dynasty, writers like Wang Chong (c. 19-90 C.E.) were debunking belief in the literal reality of spirit manifestations. Wang cites no less an authority than Confucius himself:
Confucius buried his mother at Fang. Later there was a heavy rain and the grave mound collapsed. When Confucius heard of this he wept bitterly and said: “The ancients did not repair graves,” and he never repaired it. If the dead had consciousness then they would surely be angry that people did not repair their graves, and Confucius, realizing this, would accordingly have repaired the grave in order to please his mother’s spirit.
(Birch 90)
In keeping with his narratives’ implicit moral structure— good is rewarded, evil punished, and any deviation from this formula is explicitly lamented in the author’s commentaries—Pu Songling introduces “greater and lesser deities, demigods, and suprahuman figures, both male and female” into his tales variously to serve as the agents of justice and retribution, to instill humility by reminding characters of their mortal limitations, and to indicate where flaws in human institutions and bureaucracies are mirrored even by entities beyond the mundane realm.
Emphasizing the importance of the land and its resources, Chinese people since antiquity have made sacrifices to local mountains and waterways, to encourage harvests and to solicit for rain (Bonnefoy 238). The Confucian Book of Rites (liji) even codifies the rituals associated with such sacrifices, specifying roles for the populace at large, for noblepersons, and even for the emperor (e.g., Lao 213-17). Confucius believed that public rituals of this sort promoted solidarity among the people; the local veneration of what we might call “gods of place” applies the same logic. Such figures perform a unifying function as the people show respect for them through acts of obeisance and also supplicate them to serve as protectors/advocates—a practice certainly not limited to rural areas, as the temples to city gods that I’ve visited in places like Tai’an and Yuncheng (where the latter’s city god is a salt deity, associated with the nearby salt lakes) amply testify. Veneration of gods of place also serves as an assertion of local pride, nurturing respect and stewardship for the natural resources of one’s community. Showing sincere obeisance for such entities often produces positive effects in Pu’s strange tales. Di Zhanchi in “The God of Poyang” (poyang shen) stops at a temple as he’s preparing to cross Poyang Lake and shows respect for a local deity. As a consequence, he receives some unanticipated assistance during a storm on the lake that threatens the lives of his family. Lest people believe such entities simply exist to be appeased—that is, bribed—into acceding to supplicants’ requests, however, Pu’s stories occasionally simply assert the spontaneous intercession of such figures into the lives of human beings who fail to show proper respect for the realms with which the entities are associated. Hiker Li Huidou is treated to wine in “The Mountain God” (dali jiangjun) by raucous fellow travelers, for example, but when the god of the mountain approaches the group in human form, the “travelers” revert to their normal state, and Li learns to his consternation why the wine he was drinking tasted so astringent.
Richard von Glahn has observed that Confucius’ “famous pronouncement that one should ‘revere the spirits, but keep one’s distance from them’ probably reflects the common sentiment of an age” (33), a spiritual uncertainty that translated into respect for the power of a wide variety of spirits.1 This became a tool of dynastic ideology, as Chinese mythology in a broad sense “was transformed into history by scholars whose main concern was to teach an ethics and an art of government and who did so by referring to models that they sought in early antiquity” (Bonnefoy 233). It’s not surprising, then, to see the spirit of a famous assassin suddenly appear in “Nie Zheng” (nie zheng) to intimidate an
d chastise Prince Lu for immoral behavior. But Pu Songling tends to be much more versatile in his presentation of spirits and deities. He draws upon the myth of He Mei, the toilet god, to foreground the malfeasance of an evil fox spirit in “Elder Sister Hu” (hu dagu) and to indicate the consequences of unwitting veneration—for the fearful respect that Yue Yujiu’s family shows the fox is condemned by a magician named Li Chengyao as virtual obeisance. Scholar Tao Wangsan (“Xiaoxie” [xiaoxie]) falls in love with two female ghosts, and when one of them is kidnapped by a spirit official working for the local city god, Tao threatens to “attack his image and trample it into the mud,” reminding readers of the localization of spiritual power represented by the effigies in temples and monasteries, but also suggesting that official corruption can occur anywhere, even in the suprahuman world. On a benevolent note, Pu draws upon the example of the divine title character in “Peng Haiqiu” (peng haiqiu), and the kindnesses that he shows scholar Peng Haogu, to raise the rhetorical question in his closing commentary, “Lions, elephants, cranes, and even the roc know to nurture those of their species, so how can we think that the immortals have no love for humanity?” The focus in the tales may be upon what is specifically “strange” in them, but Pu continually places them in contexts that impart moral lessons and challenge intellectual complacency.
