Red-light Novels of the late Qing (China Studies) (2007)

Red-light Novels of the late Qing

China Studies Published for the Institute for Chinese Studies University of Oxford

Editors

Glen Dudbridge Frank Pieke

VOLUME 14

Red-light Novels of the late Qing By

Chloë F. Starr

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007

Cover illustration: Textual compilation from Xiuxiang Huayue hen (Guangyi Shuju, n.d.), author’s copy. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

ISSN 1570-1344 ISBN 978 90 04 15629 6 © Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

. . . to say this is a book which leads people into depravity would be mistaken. Preface, Qinglou meng

CONTENTS Acknowledgements ..................................................................... Preface ......................................................................................... Chapter One 1.1 1.2

1.3 1.4

1.5

1.6

1.7 1.8

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

Text and Context

The Literary Context ........................................................ Classifying the Late Qing: Literary Periods and Divisions ............................................................................. 1.2.1 Dening the Late Qing ......................................... 1.2.2 Old, New and Modern ......................................... Raising Fiction ................................................................... The ‘Courtesan Novel’ and its Reading History .............. 1.4.1 Editions and Texts: The Modern ‘Courtesan Novel’ ....................................................................... Literary Ancestry: A Brief Survey .................................... 1.5.1 Love and Warnings: Lessons from Ming Short Stories ..................................................................... 1.5.2 Narrating the Perfect Woman: Caizi jiaren novellas ................................................................... 1.5.3 Textual Origins and Gendered Desire: Honglou meng ......................................................................... The Textual Context ......................................................... 1.6.1 Textual Meaning .................................................... 1.6.2 Scholars and Texts in a Post-kaozheng Era ............. 1.6.3 Technological Advances ........................................ Adverts and Bans ............................................................... Rights to the Text: Authors and Authority ......................

Chapter Two

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1 3 5 10 15 18 23 27 29 40 47 53 55 57 59 64 66

The Narrator Framed

Introducing Narrator and Text ......................................... Figuring the Narrator ........................................................ Narrator, Text and Transmission: Mirrors and Frames ... 2.3.1 Frames .................................................................... The Central Story and the Fiction of Unmediated Transmission ......................................................................

75 90 98 100 106

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2.5 2.6 2.7

Narratorial Contradictions and Resolutions ..................... The Effects of Edition ....................................................... Conclusions ........................................................................

Chapter Three 3.1 3.2

3.3

3.4

3.5 3.6

4.1

4.2

Characterisation in Context

Reading Red-light Characters: Textured and Gendered Relationships ...................................................................... The Essential Male: Qinglou meng ....................................... 3.2.1 Text ........................................................................ 3.2.2 Qing ......................................................................... 3.2.3 Honglou meng ............................................................ 3.2.4 Female Roles .......................................................... The Group Male: Fengyue meng .......................................... 3.3.1 Narrated Character ............................................... 3.3.2 Group Characterisation ......................................... 3.3.3 Bilateral Relations: Purchase and Betrayal ........... 3.3.4 Suicidal Loyalty ..................................................... Conversational Drama: Haishang hua liezhuan .................... 3.4.1 Stock Characters .................................................... 3.4.2 Jealousy .................................................................. 3.4.3 Gendered Viewpoints ............................................ 3.4.4 The Social Ladder ................................................. Reading Character ............................................................ Conclusions ........................................................................

Chapter Four

111 118 121

128 134 135 143 146 147 152 154 159 164 170 176 177 181 184 187 187 193

Structure: The Textual Representation of Itself

Narrative Structures and the Nineteenth-Century Novel 4.1.1 Narrative Drama: The Red-light Novel as Textual Soap-Opera ............................................................ 4.1.2 Poetry ..................................................................... 4.1.3 Drinking Games .................................................... 4.1.4 Macro-Structure: End Frames, Disjunctures, and the Supernatural .................................................... 4.1.5 Romantic/Realist Distinctions .............................. The Text in the World ...................................................... 4.2.1 New Printing Technologies and Novel Serialisation ............................................................

199 203 212 219 223 228 231 236

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4.2.2 Serial and Narrative .............................................. 4.2.3 Text and Image ..................................................... Subsequent Editions: Red-light Fiction Re-made ............. 4.3.1 Modern Editions and the Place of the Author .... 4.3.2 Removing the Prefaces: A Case Study ................. 4.3.3 Modern Editorial Approaches .............................. 4.3.4 Serial Editions ........................................................ Conclusions ........................................................................

242 248 253 256 257 263 266 268

Bibliography ................................................................................ Index ...........................................................................................

275 287

4.3

4.4

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am very grateful to many who have seen this work through various stages of evolution, from DPhil. thesis, to portions of articles, to monograph on red-light novels, with a deviation further into textual studies restrained by considerations of cohesion. Glen Dudbridge both supervised an earlier edition of the text when I was a graduate student, and has acted as editorial advisor for inclusion in this series: his assiduous care is much appreciated. I am very glad that Margaret Hillenbrand agreed to swap entire manuscripts at nal draft stage: I fear I got the better deal. Many thanks are due to those who gave comments on chapters and earlier portions, including Elisabeth Dutton, Jim Hinch, Tao Tao Liu, Laura Newby and David Pollard, my doctoral examiner; all those involved with ‘Gentility;’ and colleagues and students in Cambridge, Durham, SOAS and Oxford. An anonymous reader at Brill made some particularly insightful criticisms which caused much re-writing and have, I hope, produced a stronger text. Patricia Radder, also at Brill, has been most efcient and helpful. David Helliwell at the Bodleian has always been extremely generous with his time, and rst port of call for library advice. Alexander Des Forges, Joseph McDermott and Catherine Yeh were very gracious in furnishing me chapters from forthcoming works. Patrick Hanan inspired my initial research into the topic with a graduate course on courtesan novels at Harvard University in the mid-1990s. A term’s sabbatical from St John’s College, Durham, kept research viable during a busy post. D.F. Starr has procured editions in Liulichang, read through copious semi-formed drafts, given technical advice, and never complained at checking translations (isn’t is curious how our father’s generation still has better classical Chinese?). Thanks are due most of all to those who have supported me throughout the research, writing and job hunt phases of life, and in particular my family, to whom this volume is dedicated.

PREFACE ‘We make love and we make texts, and we make both in a seemingly endless series of imaginative variations’1

The sensuous cinematography to the screen play of Arthur Golden’s novel Memoirs of a Geisha, set in pre-war Kyoto, briey propelled the courtesan back into the popular imagination as a highly trained and glamorous, abused plaything. A few months later in 2006, Catherine Yeh published her monograph Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910, which presented the courtesan in Shanghai at the turn of the twentieth century as a harbinger of the modern, an autonomous iconoclast, manipulating her new media image for maximal publicity and nancial gain. Between Golden’s geisha courtesans, whose present day viewer is made to feel complicit in an act of exploitative voyeurism, and Yeh’s modern business women, designing calling cards and exploring franchise opportunities, lies a vast range of possibilities for the courtesan gure and her audience.2 This ground between reality, nostalgia and invention, is the territory of ction. The six novels that this volume studies were written between 1840 and 1910, and each takes as its focus relationships between clients and their courtesan lovers. There have been many recent studies of the historical Chinese courtesan, her prevalence, opium habit, dress sense, and general socio-economic situation. The ctional angle offers a richness that more ‘true’ accounts cannot match: the works engage in intertextual reection on the literary-historical meaning of the courtesan in China; they are client-focused, unlike the great majority of literature on the courtesan; and they bring to life the awed, human world of

1 Jerome McGann, Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 4. 2 Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha (London: Vintage, 1998). The controversial use of Chinese female leads in the lm production can have done little to help dispel assumptions of similarities between high-class Chinese courtesans and Japanese geisha. Catherine Vance Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals and Entertainment Culture 1850 – 1910 (Washington DC: University of Washington Press, 2006).

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the brothels in the vivid immediacy of the imagination. Costumes and details of ornaments add colour and texture to accounts; faux-pas in brothel etiquette delineate social niceties, and the spats and vituperative dialogues of souring relationships depict the emotions involved in such associations. The many ambiguities that arise between two main polarities of representation—courtesan as literati muse, or as victim of vindictive sexual and emotional abuse—are allowed to remain in tension across different styles of red-light novel. An advantage of ction over history is that varying points of view may be simultaneously presented; the deception of both woman and brothel-goer unmasked. Although deliberately set in a moralistic frame, red-light ction can curiously appear less judgmental than raw statistics or modern historical narratives, which are shaped by the expectation of contemporary values. Red-light novels are steeped in a tradition of writing about relationships between courtesans and literati lovers, but also within a discourse of reection on the problematic of the text, and of writing itself. This volume is precisely a study of ction: it looks at the mechanics of the narratives, and only at the gures of courtesan and client as refracted in that narrative. The negotiations and tensions of extra-societal relationships are set within the discourse of ction, with its own structures and resonances. What becomes evident through studies of narrator, characterisation and structure, is that the creation and structuring of ction is as much a source of inspiration and anxiety to red-light novelists as are their protagonists. The books are as much about writing and the act of textual reproduction as their more obvious content matter. The structuring of relationships refers always also to negotiations between author and reader, author and past writers, author and self. The discourse on courtesans operates by redening and renegotiating literary expectations of such relationships, forged over a millennium of poems, ballads, plays and stories. The focus of this volume is how those literary relations are recreated, how the soap-opera sagas of brothel narratives combine elements of traditional and modern ction in both character and text. Academic studies of courtesans have enjoyed a recent owering, reminiscent of the late Ming literati interest in the topic. Christian Henriot in the introduction to his Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History, 1849–1949 provides a useful (if sharply negative) critique of historical studies of prostitution prior to 1997; his work and that of Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, are two of the most in-depth studies

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of the ‘limited, full of gaps and sometimes inconsistent’3 sources used to reconstruct the social milieu and personalities of the trade in the late Qing. Historical studies—which have often underplayed the legal sanctions on prostitution and evidence for the seamier side of the trade in ction—are complemented by the legal cases that Matthew Sommer iterates in his 2000 volume Sex, Law and Society in Late Imperial China.4 What these accounts collectively demonstrate is the distance between the ctional novels studied here and the ‘reality’ of courtesan’s lives: their imprisonments and ill treatment, as well as their relatively high earnings and comfortable living standards. Reading the law suits gives a sense of how prostitution was ofcially viewed and represented in the Qing, although a gulf exists between the imperial ideal and societal acceptance, as well as between the stipulated penalties for pimping or other brothel practices, and local magistrates’ sentencing. Silent, historical courtesans have to be studied through the intermediaries of police reports and other evidence not written or collected for this purpose. The contemporary newspapers that historians such as Henriot or Hershatter draw on for much of their material present a selective and eventually formulaic set of reports of brawls, curiosities and advertisements. Studying the ctional courtesan as a textual phenomenon accepts the inscribedness: there is no reality to be sought behind the works. What matters in the portrayal of the novels is how the characters are formed, and what the authors meant, or sought to represent, through that process. The novels present an unashamedly local view of prostitution, and discussing prostitution is scarcely their function, however much later critics like to read the novels as documentary evidence. The six courtesan novels which form the core of this study save a researcher from the worst of generalisations by their divergent view of Qing life and their long chronological span, covering a sixty or eighty year period. They cannot easily be categorised, since their portrayals of prostitutes range from the suspirations of identikit lovers, to raging anger and spite in the lower class establishments

3 Christian Henriot, trans. Noël Castelino, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: a social history, 1849–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 203. Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). 4 Matthew Sommer, Sex, Law and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

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at the turn of the century. Their construction of society is no more unimodal, although there are similarities and trends in how narrative representations are formed. Reading historical sources makes evident the constructedness of the ctional versions. The vividness and crude presence of the newspaper and legal records reminds us there were real individuals so treated, real women murdered, sold or honoured. A spate of excellent tomes in the 1990s on women and women’s writings, lives, histories and relationships provides background depth to studies of female characters in late Qing ction. Foremost among these are Susan Mann’s Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century and Dorothy Ko’s Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in China 1573–1722. With the publication of the journal Nan nü, Men Women and Gender in Early and Late Imperial China in 1999 (a title now shortened to remove the time span limitation) a forum specically for discussing gender issues emerged, and several Nan nü articles appear in this bibliography. Special issues such as that on women’s suicide raise provocative questions on the nature of women’s self-understanding, empowerment and own biographical discourses.5 Readings of Qing women’s writings throw into relief the male-authored versions studied here. A small number of western academics have focussed particularly on the courtesan in literature, including Catherine Yeh, whose published articles have been supplemented by the monograph Shanghai Love, which, like the studies of Hershatter and Henriot, takes the city of Shanghai as its epicentre. Three PhD dissertations discuss the novels considered here: Stephen Cheng’s 1979 study of the novel Haishang hua liezhuan entitled ‘Flowers of Shanghai and the Late Ch’ing Courtesan Novels;’ Paola Zamperini’s 1998 ‘Lost Bodies: images and representations of prostitution in late Qing ction’ (soon to be followed by a monograph The Secret des Fleurs: Love, Death and Syphilis), and Alexander Des Forges, ‘Street Talk and Alley Stories: Tangled Narratives of Shanghai from ‘Lives of Shanghai Flowers (1892) to ‘Midnight’ (1933).6 These, together

5

See Nan nü 3.1 (2002), reprinted as Paul Ropp, Harriet T. Zurndorfer, eds., Passionate Women: Female Suicide in Late Imperial China (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 6 Stephen H. Cheng, ‘Flowers of Shanghai and the Late Ch’ing Courtesan Novels’ (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1979); Paola Zamperini’s ‘Lost Bodies: Images and Representations of Prostitution in Late Qing Fiction’ (PhD dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1999); Alexander Des Forges, ‘Street Talk and Alley Stories:

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with articles by scholars such as Patrick Hanan, Keith McMahon and Ellen Widmer on individual works and novels, and David Der-Wei Wang’s earlier study of Qing literature, form the kernel of a small but growing body of English-language texts on aspects of courtesan literature. These have all fed into the present study alongside Asian critical studies, although none have produced the close reading of text and narrative aimed for here. Studying texts as texts opens up a world of western scholarship which can be set against Qing understandings of the literary and material text, and against contemporary readings of texts. Textual studies in the west shifted gear in the 1980s and 1990s when the elds of bibliography and textual criticism were brought together by scholars such as Jerome McGann and a generation of critics including G. Thomas Tanselle, D.F. McKenzie and D.C. Greetham. Critics no longer sought to produce a denitive text, derived by interpolating authorial intention from the earliest available editions. Each edition became a signicant object of transmission and subject of study in itself; the text taken apart and recongured. Books, the history of the book, the economics of publishing, print processes and their effect on reading patterns, all leapt to the head of conference agendas. Readings in western theories have helped focus this study by posing questions pertinent to multipleedition works, and offering a challenge to the narrow literary-critical or political readings of some commentators on Chinese ction. Few recent literary critics have brought China’s own long and distinguished history of textual analysis to bear on late Qing literary works. Text and Fiction Red-light novels evoke the lifestyles of the leisured âneurs of eastern seaboard cities and their pleasure-bound, often tragic, relationships. If prostitutes are ‘on the game,’ then the authors of late Qing novels describing the relationships of clients and courtesans enjoyed their own

Tangled Narratives of Shanghai from ‘Lives of Shanghai Flowers (1892) to “Midnight” (1933)’ (PhD dissertation, University of Princeton, 1998). Des Forges considers Wu dialect novels in a study of literary form that shares material with this work; Zamperini has also published on female suicide and within gender discourse on clothing representations and the female body. See also Chloë Starr, ‘The Late Qing Courtesan Novel as Text and Fiction’ (D. Phil dissertation, University of Oxford, 1999), on which much of this volume draws.

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literary jeux. From the gaiety of drinking sessions and poetic composition in the more idealised novels, to the rancorous and randan behaviour of spiteful women and hoodlum clients in works at the turn of the twentieth century, the novels explore a network of relationships governed both by money and lust, and by nostalgic ideals. Woven into these tales, which may indeed have been written not as excoriating confessions, but as apologues, guide-books to brothel protocol to save others from the fate of the duped (male) characters, are numerous instances of textual play. Novels make much of the gure of the narrator and his connections with the pseudonymous author, playfully describe how the written volume came to the hand of its readers, and quote extensively from other texts, by verbal reference and transposition of form. We might expect red-light novels to encourage an absorbed reading, a page-turning compulsion to follow the lives of the characters and live within the world of the narrative until its nal outcome, but this selection of works conversely encourages, and even demands, reection on the act of reading. Whether we judge that the stories merit the critical attention they seem to be seeking or not, the texts’ narrative strategies repeatedly interrupt the process and force the reader to acknowledge the act of reading, and the text as a constructed ction. Ample evidence is given throughout this volume to show that red-light novelists deliberately employ their skill in ‘thickening’ the textual condition and in exhibiting the processes of creation for the reader. The textual play invokes a series of questions, whose jocular surface can either be skimmed or broken through to the deeper thoughts on self and epistemology that are raised by the act of writing. The discourse on ‘truth’ and ‘real’ that red-light novelists adopt and adapt from the classic eighteenth-century novel Honglou meng 紅樓夢 (Dream of red chambers) has usually been taken by literary critics to refer to ctional versus historical truth, to how literature and history both comprise elements of ction in expressing reality, but there is also clearly a play on textual truth and reality: a metaphor which became more powerful as the years produced more variant texts, different endings, and sequels. Red-light novels are textually promiscuous; they absorb and interact with other texts and sequels, and spawn new texts from unlikely unions. The illegitimate sex of their storyline is complemented by a tradition of textual illegitimacy, both in the sense that ction was always assumed to be an inferior mode of writing in Chinese literary history, and in that the works were subject to periodic bans by the state for their immoral content. The novels provide a deliberately provocative matrix of text,

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sex and subversion. Both the act of writing and the act of brothel sex can be seen as a form of self-abandonment. The authors were all too aware that text and sex were socially situated acts, being reproduced in a climate of rapidly changing mores, and that readers would closely identify author with protagonists. In their explorations of sexual and textual meaning, the novels provide an insight into wider changes in understandings of self and literary value in the nineteenth century. This volume argues that we cannot read ction well if we do not understand the textual context of writing as well as its literary one. The distinction between the textual and the literary rst needs making, because it has been made and assumed by most critics over the last century, but subsequently needs dismantling, just as the novelists collapse the distinction in their works. If two decades of works of textual criticism have persuaded students of English literature of the need to overcome this arbitrary distinction in scholarship, the case of the Chinese novel cries out for a re-thinking of how we approach literary works. Too often Chinese literature has been read as if the linguistic codes (i.e. the storyline, the characters on the page, the semantic text, the scanning or recitation of which constitutes reading) were all that needed considering in reading, as if the bibliographic codes (the paper and print, the layout of text in a given edition) had no part in ‘literature’ or effect on the story or its reception.7 This mode of reading may work for some genres, but is seriously decient for a style of writing which aunts its textuality, which takes seriously the writerly side of literature in prefaces, comments from friends, circulation patterns of manuscripts, as well as in the eclectic mixture of textual genres inserted into the story text. Individually and collectively, the red-light novels participate in a meta-conversation on the nature of texts, the meaning of communication between reader and writer, and the value of traditional notions of inscribing the self in the context of the late nineteenth century. These novels invite textual analysis because of their high degree of self-analysis, in the ction of the narrator, the ction of transmission set up within the stories, and the ction of its ction: the illusion that the author is writing of brothels to warn others not to visit brothels. Authors spend much time and effort in their narratives considering the physical book and how it reaches readers, and writing this into the works in

7 The ‘double helix’ of the bibliographic and the linguistic codes has been put forward and elaborated most fully by the critic Jerome McGann, see e.g. Textual Condition, 77.

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more or less clumsy forms. Courtesan life is an illusion of life, a parallel world to the real outside, mirrored in textual framings. An appreciation of red-light works as both text and ction erodes the oft-repeated judgement of the works as merely the output of ‘frustrated scholars,’ the label no longer an adequate explanation for the phenomenon of red-light ction, its wealth of forms and longevity. The changing nature of texts and text production over the course of the Qing has been widely studied, but often without specic reference to literary works or trends. Textual practices (such as emendation or commentary) that were part of the reading and writing life of any educated Qing male have been dissociated from their literary oeuvre by twentieth- and twenty-rst century critics. Changes in physical texts and in reading patterns (commercialised, serialised, illustrated, spliced into magazines, mass produced for unknown and lesser educated readers) affected how authors thought about, and wrote, texts, provoking in the late Qing a reinterpretation of the textual tradition. This volume attempts to recreate some of the links, to reconsider the site of text production and consumption and its effects on the writing of literature, not as some interesting but separate area of study, but as an integrated part, just as text and ction were integrated aspects of intellectual life for their nineteenth-century authors. Each of the chapters presents an aspect of literary analysis—on the narrator, characterisation etc.—and attempts to engage a parallel reading of text and ction. In this way the volume provides a detailed study of the links between textuality and ctionality in the writings of a series of Qing authors and in successive editions of their works, but also presents a model for aligning literary and textual studies. Literature is entextualised, a written, transmitted and read process. Although Qing writers were largely silent on the technical aspects of book production, the legacy of the evidential scholarship movement of the mid-Qing and the willingness of authors to become involved in new printing processes in the late Qing, suggest a greater intellectual closeness to processes of transmission and production than has been assumed. The time-lag between writing and print publication reduced dramatically at the end of the nineteenth century, and authors began to oversee and direct editions of their own writings. The coexistence of manuscript and print versions of texts, and of multiple versions of each, guided the form of Chinese textual criticism and, in ways that remain largely unexplored, literary production itself.

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Although texts have always reached readers through an editorial horizon and through a set of social operations, the tendency among literary critics to hive off any consideration of economic or production aspects of reading from ‘the narrative,’ as though the pure moment of authorial inspiration could be recaptured (if it existed), or as if there were no aporia between an author writing and reader comprehending, takes little heed of Chinese literary practices. Chinese ction traditions neatly presage western critical concerns in the twentieth century: the Demannic reader as a site of interpretation is already pre-conceived in the Chinese ction text; the interests of textual critics in multiple editions nd riches in the prefaces and variant editions of Qing novels circulating, and so on. The system of writing commentary into texts, where serious literature, and, from the late Ming onwards, ction too, was published with another writer’s thoughts integrated into the reading process, proclaims the text to be a site of both writing and reading. As becomes clear, the textual model that writers were working with affects how their ction was written. The dominant Chinese reading model, which has assumed transparency between what an author inputs and what a reader reads, and between the characterisation of the author implied in the text and his historical self, needs revisiting in the case of nineteenth-century ction and the models it proposes of text and narrative. Works of red-light ction set in tea-houses and pleasure gardens, or with increasing frequency towards the end of the nineteenth century in a brothel cityscape, have not been critically acclaimed, spending much of their history derided by literary critics in China, or banned by censors on grounds of moral health. What must pique both censor and critic, and deserves attention, is the enduring popularity of the novels. Zhang Chunfan’s Jiu wei gui 九尾龜 (Nine-tailed turtle), for example, one of the most widely read books of all in the 1920s, is still sustaining new editions, print runs and high circulation, although it “fell into oblivion” in the intervening years.8 Popular, trashy novels of the type with which red-light ction has been categorised by twentieth-century critics typically have large print runs but brief shelf lives, the literature of airports and train stations. Their popularity derives in large part 8 So writes one critic of its current status in the late 1970s. Jean Duval, “ ‘The Nine-tailed Turtle’: Pornography or ‘Fiction of Exposure’?” in ed. Dolehelová-Velingerová, The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 177.

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from their contemporaneity, slang, political in-jokes, and credible soapopera style characterisation. It seems unlikely that the ‘historical value’ mainland critics have recently claimed for these works, as useful points of entry into the nineteenth century, has sustained consumer purchasing over the century. If the works are not just passing pulp ction, it might be time to adopt a new critical strategy. In doing so, the question of the meaning of ction in the late Qing, before the May Fourth paradigm overwhelmed critical discourse, is re-appraised. Late Qing literature in its entirety has been subject to a negative appraisal from twentieth-century critics, and red-light ction exemplies the extremes in critical reaction. A brief foray into any large bookshop in a major Chinese city today will unearth one, two or more modern editions from different publishing houses of nineteenth-century red-light novels. The bookshop owners may not always be willing to sell foreigners copies of the full range of red-light ction, and its supposed sister literature of erotic works, but the works are on open shelves throughout China. The purchasing situation can have a certain nineteenth-century feel to it, redolent of the Japanese guilds’ agreement with the Bakufu government to hide away ‘unusual’ books when Americans were passing along the streets of Edo, but even illegally-published pirate editions can be sought, as then, via local friends.9 The novels are not, in fact, particularly salacious, with only one of the six works on which this volume focuses subject to serious editorial cuts on content grounds, but they vary widely in style and content, as well as readability. The printing history and reception of the texts, including the many modern editions of these works, reveal much about current concepts of literature and literary history. Having been categorised as a set, and as ‘late Qing’ works, red-light novels invite further thinking on naming and divides. The novels have been ofcially textualised: catalogued and distributed into genres. They have variously appeared in manuscript, print and serialised journals, and in editions throughout the 1920s, 30s, 80s and 90s. They have never been the subject of a monograph, and have rarely been studied as literature

9 In Chengdu in summer 2002, for example, a major book shop held a set of around 90 volumes of books banned in the Qing on its shelf, but when I asked, no price was available, and then the computer broke down so it ‘couldn’t be sold’ to me. Careful examination revealed a single volume price tucked away, but indeed no publishing data or set price. When I returned a couple of days later, the ninety volume set had been bought/removed from the shelf. For censorship in Edo, see Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 315–6.

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in their own right but almost always as a contrastive genre or control set: or they have been used as cultural or historical texts in gender, dialect or cultural studies. Chapter Divisions Chapter One presents an overview of ction in the late Qing, of the antecedents to red-light novels, and of the cultural status of texts in the Qing. The classication of works by era, by genre and by literary ancestry has preoccupied generations of critics, particularly on the mainland. Red-light texts have never been considered part of the ‘new’ ction which arose at the turn of the century, falling outside its political and social remit. In their innovations in character, narratorial guise and structure, the works demand at the very least a broadening of our idea of Qing ction, and so of the chronology and derivation of modern Chinese literature. The rst section of Chapter One tries to clear up confusion in the widely used term ‘late Qing,’ and considers further denitions of ‘red-light’ or ‘courtesan’ novels. While the usefulness of precise denitions of the period is questioned, a classicatory approach enables intertextual links to be assessed. The second section of this chapter considers three example source pools on which nineteenthcentury red-light novels drew: Ming short stories, caizi jiaren 才子佳人 (scholar and beauty) novellas, and the great eighteenth-century novel Honglou meng. The text and the courtesan have this in common: they have both been misused. As undergraduates a decade ago, we were handed A4 photocopies of all of the texts we studied: Han history, Tang poems, and Republican ction. No matter the provenance, size, or degree of corruption of the original or its early descendants, we were given facsimiles of printed editions to read from, albeit with differing fonts and incursions of commentary. Since we graduated with very little understanding of the delight of early texts, and of the importance of the visual and physical text in reading literature, the third section of Chapter One provides a glimpse of what we lacked: an introduction to texts in their critical beauty. This discussion is necessarily brief, and readers are directed to references in the footnotes for more adequate studies, but the purpose of the section is twofold: to set the scene for reading ction with reference to textuality, and to demonstrate the variety and immediacy of questions relating to texts and printing for Qing authors. Four aspects are sketched: the traditional cultural meanings

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ascribed to texts in China; technological developments in the Qing; the circulation of texts, including prohibitions; and nally, the respective roles and rights of authors and publishers in the process of textual creation and dissemination. Chapters Two, Three and Four each consider an aspect of narrative. Detailed studies of the narrator, of structure and of character, allow these relatively unfamiliar red-light novels to assert their place in literary critical history. Chapter Two examines the role of the narrator. Introductions to the narrators of each of the six red-light texts take several pages: these are far from straightforward gures. New possibilities in the role of the narrator over the course of the nineteenth-century point to developments in the representation of ction and the ctionality of the narrative, as well as in chronology and time-consciousness. The narrator is heavily involved in the creation of a reading frame for the novels, and in the distancing of narrator’s voice from that of author. Convoluted relationships between narrator and text, and narrator and implied author, are central to the build-up of levels of ction in the works, and to moulding a distinction between the implied and the historical author. An end-note to the chapter points back to the theme of this volume, an insistence that the narrator be read in textual context, since different editions of the works alter his role. Chapter Three is the closest we get to ‘real’ courtesans and clients, and occasional footnotes throughout the chapter refer to parallels between ctional occurrences and evidence from historical studies (some of which itself derives from novels). Relationships form the focus of the chapter, traced through the choreographing of characters across the works. Three examples are given to analyse the formation of character: Qinglou meng 青樓夢 (Dream of green chambers), Fengyue meng 風月夢 (Dream of wind and moon/Dream of romantic illusions) and Haishang hua liezhuan 海上花列傳 (Ranked biographies of Shanghai owers), each of which uses different modes of characterisation and has a very different frame of relationships. While this chapter indicates the comparative lack of an individuated subject in nineteenth-century ction, it demonstrates how characterisation itself becomes a more important focus in novels towards the end of the century. Recurring themes of female suicide, love-struck qing, deceit, and delight, in both garden-based and city novels, in casts of hundreds and tales of few, suggest that the neat divide critics have formulated between ‘romantic’ and ‘realist’ streams of courtesan novel needs re-thinking. The failure of relationships across the range of novels is central to a reading of red-light works, and to their wider signicance.

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The nal chapter draws together two central themes of this volume, narrative and text, by rst examining the narrative structures used to create the range of red-light novels, and then assessing how the format of the texts changed across the course of the nineteenth century, and the effects of changes on those same narrative structures. The third part of the chapter develops this theme by tracing differences in form of later editions of the novels, and questioning how textual change, such as the removal of a preface, affects narrative meaning. Narrative structures which appear across the range of red-light ction, and some that are only employed in the earlier novels, are analysed in sections on poetry, drinking games and dramatic interludes. Framing devices are re-considered, with the introduction of dream or supernatural worlds into the text. If print was central to the rapid increases in book production at the turn of the twentieth century, print also shaped the new direction that literature took. This can be seen in the new-style illustrations and the very different format in which the later two novels, Haishang hua liezhuan and Jiu wei gui, appeared. Chapter Four explores the effects of the rise of the periodical press towards the end of the nineteenth century on literary form and reception, and compares these with similar shifts in production mode and readership in Victorian England. In the nal section, ve editions of Huayue hen 花月痕 (Traces of owers and the moon), spanning a century of print publication, are presented as a case study to demonstrate how different editions both incorporate and provoke different readings of the story. The modern editions which have been printed as part of particular series of works show further how the imposition of genre on a text can affect its reception. Red-light Novels in the Late Qing explores the way in which knowledge of texts as material objects suffused the writing of ction in the late Qing. For the authors whose red-light novels appear here, the ctionality of ction was predicated on the textuality of the text: that is, how the authors wrote and thought about novels as imaginative literature drew on and reected their understanding of how narrative was linked with the physical, material text. This volume is not primarily interested in dening the literary excellence or otherwise of the novels that Lu Xun termed xiaxie 狹邪, wayward or lewd, and David Der-wei Wang has labelled ‘depravity ction,’10 although it treats the works as literature and advocates using techniques of literary analysis on what were considered

10

See Chapter One below for discussion of these terms.

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until very recently low-brow works. What this study engages with is the relation between books as texts and the play on ction of the narrative. An intricate connection is proposed between the textual surfeit of the nineteenth century and the ctional wrappings and layers with which authors enveloped themselves. Although a concentration on texts is hardly new—this has become something of a vogue eld in the last few years, with some excellent and interesting studies11—serious efforts to integrate textual and narrative studies have yet to take hold. This volume presents one such attempt.

11 Among the many stand out Robert E. Hegel’s, Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), looking at the text as artefact and as art; David Rolston’s work on commentary Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), and the Festschrift for Patrick Hanan, Writing the Material Text, edited by Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia H. Liu, Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia Series, 2003).

CHAPTER ONE

TEXT AND CONTEXT 1.1

The Literary Context

A sign that late Qing literature is now coming of age can be seen in the increasing frequency of reference to the ‘four great works of late Qing literature,’ akin to the four great masterpieces of the Ming that Andrew Plaks popularized for western students.1 There is, of course, no red-light ction among their number, but nor are the novels the prescriptive, socially improving literature for which contemporary critics were calling. Recent studies of lowly red-light ction indicate a gradual shift on the part of critics, the cumulative effects of scholarship eroding the paradigm of a literature of dissent, deceit, and authors searching for escape. While the judgement persists that ‘courtesan novels’ are poor literature and their authors louche rakes, brothel ction has also begun to attract a broader scholarship. Traditional critical denigration of the aesthetic quality of nineteenth-century literature of all types is eroding, and the political frame employed by twentieth-century critics to consider the era is slowly being dismantled, as focus shifts from reformers and their imagined literatures to the actual works printed and consumed. Outside a few select Qing works, translated and much studied, such as Honglou meng from the late eighteenth century or Rulin waishi 儒林外史 (The scholars) from the early nineteenth, only a handful of novels, including the ‘four greats’ Lao Can youji 老殘游記 (Lao Can’s travels), Ershi nian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang 二十年目睹之怪現狀 (Strange events witnessed over the last twenty years), Guanchang xianxing ji 官場現形記 (Revelations on ofcialdom/Bureaucracy exposed), and Niehai hua 孽海花 (Flower in the sea of retribution) have widespread recognition among non-specialists. Many sinologists would be hardpressed to name a novel written between 1840 and 1905. This is not so much the result of a dearth of works as a by-product of the ‘literary

1 Andrew Plaks, The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987).

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revolution’ of the early twentieth century and the totalizing narrative created in its wake. Critical concentration on works which tted the accepted theoretical model of the revolution has meant that until recently there has been little sideways research into the rest of Qing ction. Combined with a tendency in Chinese scholarship to label and categorise, the dismissal of other works of Qing ction has endured. Constituting literature of the turn of the century as xin xiaoshuo 新小說, a new, socially inspiring ction in the vernacular language, ensured one dominant strand of argument and focus for scholarship. The richness of the literary-political discussions that lled the new literary journals and sought to inspire a new style of ction over two to three decades from the late 1890s is well documented. The place of literature in society, the standing of ction within that literature and comparative studies of foreign literatures have all vied to assert their centrality in the debate.2 Beginning as a small reforming sector within the political sphere, Liang Qichao and his colleagues promoted their understanding of the purpose of ction and ensured the spread of this view among authors. Now that this socially-enhancing ‘new literature’ has been downgraded to one sector of production—and not a particularly commercially successful one at that—an overdue theoretical reappraisal of literature in the preceding decades is underway. This volume offers a contribution to that appraisal in examining how Qing authors of redlight novels wove into their narratives a discourse on the literary text and on ction itself. Narrative and text are inseparable in written works: yet the implications of this truism for the study of ction have been interred along with the books, awaiting the ctional exhumation envisaged in the opening chapters of the novel Huayue hen. Although Qing novelists wrote an awareness of the duality of text and ction into their works, it has taken a generation of bibliographic and textual scholars to realert critics to the importance of reading the text as well as we read its narrative. The early part of this chapter provides the literary critical background to six selected red-light novels, teasing out recent readings of Qing literature, and looking at the place of ction within the Chinese literary tradition, before evaluating the forms of traditional narrative that have inuenced red-light authors. In considering the patterns of

2 On these debates see e.g. Chen Pingyuan 陳平原, Chen Pingyuan xiaoshuo shi lun ji (xia) 陳平原小說史論紀(下) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei Renmin, 1997), 1408 et passim.

text and context

3

classication in which later critics have xed the courtesan novels, the chapter points to discrepancies in these boundaries, concluding “how little that system illuminates the literature itself.”3 The second section of the chapter provides the textual background to complement the literary, considering the cultural value assigned to written texts in the Qing, their material form, and how commercial changes in text production affect storylines. 1.2

Classifying the Late Qing: Literary Periods and Divisions

Chronology and genre intersect in the common phrase ‘the late Qing courtesan novel.’ ‘Late Qing’ denes a period, and the literature of that period, but the literary period has not been set by the literature. The term ‘late Qing’ is universally used, but with widespread, if unacknowledged, disagreement on a time frame or inclusion criteria. There is a circularity in the scholarship: understandings of what constitutes late Qing ction (usually its didactic value and realism) determine the limits of the period, which then exclude other ctions which might have altered the denition. Debates over the criteria for dening the upper and lower limits of the late Qing have often upstaged the literature being dened, and deected attention further away from lesser known works. This late Qing literature, in most analyses, is a politicized ction of social worth, which drew on the understandings of contemporary critics in afrming and creating its value. The courtesan novels considered here fall within the bounds of a wider denition of late Qing (~1840–1911), but not within the narrower time limits of those who dene the period by its reactionary social or political content. Literary history is ever constrained by earlier constructions. These feed into teaching institutions, producing courses on modern Chinese literature which exclude Qing works from the debate, and courses on late Qing literature which look no further back than 1900. Late Qing ction has been retroactively read in apposition to the ‘modern’ Chinese literature of the May Fourth period, and becomes those novels and critical essays in which glimpses of the future can be detected. An attempt to nd within the literary texts signs of narrative evolution, different

3 Glen Dudbridge, “A Question of Classication in Tang Narrative: The Story of Ding Yue,” in Alfredo Cadonna, ed., India, Tibet, China: Genesis and Aspects of Traditional Narrative (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1999), 157.

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structural styles or intertextual references might support a distinction between novels of the 1890s or 1900s and those of previous decades, but the merit of this discovery lies not in defending any particular periodisation, but more in questioning conventional accounts of the divisions surrounding the late Qing, and the claims of May Fourth writers and their later critics to unique literary innovation. Differences discernible in narrative style at the turn of the century, it will be suggested over the following chapters, are related as much to the effects of changing textual formats as to political or theoretical factors. The second axis of categorisation to which red-light ction has been subject throughout the twentieth century concerns genre: how the texts have been grouped, packaged and appraised since their inscription. The label most widely attached, Lu Xun’s description of xiaxie novels, has been translated as ‘depravity ction,’ but is most often rendered ‘courtesan novel’ in English. Most twentieth-century literary critics have kept a wary distance from the text of these novels, neither commenting on the beauty of textual form nor exploring the intricacies of narrative style within. Any literary passion which the texts might have aroused has been circumscribed by clinical processes of categorisation. Prudishly hidden away for most of the century, the courtesan texts enjoyed a belated owering in the 1990s, but in a sanitised form, denuded of individualistic markings, slipped into series of ‘late Qing human sentiment novels’ or ‘ten great Qing novels.’ Since critics over the course of the last century have dealt with the texts as group products, disengagement of the novels as individual texts can only take place after pondering the categories of previous scholarship and their effects on editions. In reading studies of Chinese literature it can be difcult to nd critical texts which do anything more than break down literature into labelled groups and sub-groups. Even after debates died down during the twentieth century over which of the traditional divisions of writing should include xiaoshuo 小說 (ction), as imperial categories of knowledge became defunct and were conned to historical materials, the desire to name, classify and impose a structure on literary discourse has remained astoundingly constant. Categorisation is a concern in understanding the literary and textual histories of the red-light novels because the afxing of labels has affected the way new editions have been packaged and received. Once classied, the courtesan novel was contained by becoming part of a genre which needed little further explanation.

text and context 1.2.1

5

Dening the Late Qing

A fairly typical introduction to a work on late Qing ction concludes: “The aesthetic quality of late Qing ction is not high, but it realistically records the great struggle of the Chinese people in resisting imperialism and feudalism . . .”4 A tendency to t literature into prevailing views of history permeates studies of the late nineteenth century. The literature which typies the late Qing is that which actively responded to the repeated incursions of the west and the stripping of Chinese sovereign powers, that which emerged from the national nadir when intellectuals suddenly started mobilizing with creative responses around 1900. The majority of red-light works are caught in the slough of late imperial decline: In the sixty years from the Opium Wars to the 1898 Reform Movement, the world of ction manifested itself as exceptionally depressed and conservative. The novels of this period fundamentally failed to reect squarely the series of large-scale changes which were going on in Chinese society. Those who were involved in writing ction in the period were a declining breed of feudal literati. The world of ction was largely congested with works with an ingrained feudal consciousness like Dangguan zhi 蕩冠志 or Ernü yingxiong zhuan 兒女英雄傳, or depraved (xiaxie) novels like Pinhua baojian 品花寶鑒, Qinglou meng or Huayue hen, or martial arts or detective ction like the Peng Gong’an 彭公案 books. This meant that in the ction of the era it was still feudal novels that unied the nation, forming a low tide since the appearance of Honglou meng.5

The late Qing which follows this sixty year span of the nineteenth century comprises in such discourse the ‘catch-up period’ when literature faced the growing crisis in China head-on, when new ction appeared in the multiple new ction magazines alongside a ourishing ction theory and challenged traditional views on ction, when ction nally gained social acceptance. Divergent uses of the term ‘late Qing’ evidently reect different understandings of how literary periods should be categorised. The categories have a direct effect on discussions of the main texts studied in this volume, since only two of the six novels, Haishang hua liezhuan and Jiu wei gui, come under the conventional designation of late Qing, with the remainder of the works merely printed, or re-printed, in that time 4 Yuan Jian 袁健 and Zheng Rong 鄭榮, Wan Qing xiaoshuo yanjiu gaikuo 晚清小說 研究概括 (Tianjin: Tianjin Jiaoyu, 1989), 12. 5 Yuan Jian and Zheng Rong, Wan Qing xiaoshuo gaikuo, 1–2.

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space. Jiu wei gui and Haishang hua liezhuan enjoy overlapping identities as courtesan ction, as late Qing works, and as Wu dialect or Shanghai novels, and have received correspondingly more critical attention. In a system where critical studies have been based on period divisions, status as a late Qing work provides the primary interest value of a novel, and focus on a very late ‘late Qing’ has detracted from works produced only a decade or two earlier. The tension between conventional dating and its often arbitrary links to the literature it divides up has been noted by several critics,6 but competing periodisations have continued to coexist, based on critical inuence, signicant political events, and textual analysis. This methodological confusion forms the backdrop to histories of nineteenth-century ction and its relation with later literature. A simplied diagram indicates some of the main divisions and theoretical emphases, with an example proponent of each: Fig 1.1 Some Interpretations of the Late Qing 1840–1911

Literary: changing ction, and political: Opium Wars

Kang Laixin

1894–1911

Literary thought: conclusion of classical, rise of new literature

Li Ruiteng

1895–1911

Political revolution: Sino-Japanese war as catalyst

Huang Jinzhu

1899–1911

Political and social: decade of media growth, A Ying especially literary journals

1900–1912

Literary theory: ction in the spirit of literary revolution; Book production growth

Shi Meng Ouyang Jian

Some literary histories section off the period between 1840 and the Boxer Rebellion (1900) as the rst stage of the jindai 近代 (modern) period in

6 See for example, Yan Jiayan 嚴家炎, introduction to Chen Pingyuan 陳平原, Xia Xiaohong 夏曉紅 eds., Ershi shiji zhongguo xiaoshuo ziliao 二十世紀中國小說資料 (Beijing: Beijing Daxue, 1989), 1–2; Huang Lin 黃霖, Jindai wenxue piping shi 近代 文學批評史 (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji, 1993), 2. This is hardly a novel observation: there had been a movement in the late Ming and early Qing, for example, to reject the canonizing process of literature on the grounds that dynastic eras bore no necessary relationship to the quality of poetry produced. See Pauline Yu, “Canon Formation in Late Imperial China,” in Theodore Huters, R. Bin Wong and Pauline Yu, eds., Culture and State in Chinese History, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 96.

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literature.7 As Ouyang Jian notes, jindai as a term has often been read as synonymous with late Qing, but is hardly any more scientic a division.8 Huang Jinzhu comments that historically the late Qing referred to the seventy years between the Opium Wars (~1840) and the 1911 Revolution, but the development of literature has not necessarily kept pace with history. Huang represents a conventional view which sees changes to the late Qing ctional world as beginning with the Sino-Japanese war (1895), but with the most signicant changes concentrated after the ction revolution (xiaoshuo jie geming 小說界革命) of 1902. While theoretical changes began around the earlier date, developments in actual works of ction were only seen after 1902.9 Others favouring a similar denition include the Taiwan scholar Li Ruiteng, dening the period as 1894–1911, and Shi Meng, who takes an even narrower 1900–1912.10 Kang Laixin sides with the historian’s broader denition of 1839–1911,11 while noting that the scholar A[h] Ying (Qian Xingcun) opted for 1899–1911 in his History of Late Qing Fiction, and a starting point of around 1872 for his compendium of late Qing literature. More recently Wang Hongzhi, in discussing the mutual interaction between the West and China, has also selected a literary critical date to signal the beginning of the late Qing, that of 1897 and the publication of Yan Fu and Xia Zengyou’s famed essay.12 A good number of western scholars have followed denitions of the late Qing as the last decade of the nineteenth and rst of the twentieth centuries.13

7 With the other two stages as 1900–1911 and 1911–May Fourth movement: see Wang Lixing 王立興, Zhongguo jindai wenxue kaolun 中國近代文學考論 (Nanjing: Nanjing Daxue, 1992), 147. 8 Ouyang Jian 歐陽健, Wan Qing xiaoshuo shi 晚清小說史 (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Guji, 1997), 1. 9 See Huang Jinzhu 黃錦珠, Wan Qing shiqi xiaoshuo guannian zhi zhuanbian 晚清時 期小說觀念之轉變 (Taibei: Wenshizhe, 1995), 5. Cf. Fang Zhengyao 方正耀, who comments equally denitively that “Although late Qing ction began in 1840, its high tide came in the waning ten years of the Qing dynasty.” Fang Zhengyao, Wan Qing xiaoshuo yanjiu 晚清小說研究 (Shanghai: Huadong Shifan Daxue, 1990), 1. 10 Li Ruiteng 李瑞騰, Wan Qing wenxue sixiang lun 晚清文學思想論 (Taibei: Hanguang, 1992), 2; Shi Meng 時萌, Wan Qing xiaoshuo 晚清小說 (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji, 1989), 1. 11 Kang Laixin 康來新, Wan Qing xiaoshuo lilun yanjiu 晚清小說理論研究 (Taibei: Da’an, 1986), 19 note 1. 12 Wang Hongzhi, “ ‘Yi Zhong hua Xi’ ji ‘Yi Xi hua Zhong’ ” 以中化西及以西化中 in Hu Xiaozhen 胡曉真, ed., Shibian yu weixin: wan Ming yu wan Qing de wenxue yishu 時變與維新: 晚明與晚清的文學藝術 (Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan, 2001), 590, note 1. 13 Dolehelová-Velingerová and her contributors implicitly take this line in The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century, as does Patrick Hanan in his various articles on late Qing works (see bibliography).

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Developments in critical theory are widely considered the single most important factor in the changing literary scene. Where a literary period is dened by extrinsic factors, it is unsurprising that theory is held to precede ction. Shi Meng writes “The emergence of late Qing ction theory was earlier than the period of ourishing ction: one could say that it opened up a new prospect for creative ction.”14 Scholars such as Chen Pingyuan concur that theory fed revolution, as the political slogans of reformists were embraced by literary gures, and new periodicals provided a base for the creation and publication of this new ction.15 This line of argument can only hold for those who view late Qing literature as the narrow band of works which did respond to calls for a more socially engaged literature. Aside from literary critical and political divisions, at least one recent critic has based his denition of the late Qing on book trade gures, with explanations for the nature of the new ction derived from production peaks.16 The greatest volume of ction works in the Qing was produced in the 1900s, with steep increases up to a high point of an estimated 109 vernacular novels published in the year 1909. While the ‘high tide’ critics describe at the turn of the century usually refers to the political correctness of output rather than the mass of works, explanations for an upsurge in production after 1901 derive from particular peaks in publishing during 1903 and 1907–09. This leap in quantity and ‘quality’ is linked to the reforms of the Qing court and the increased sense of precariousness they wrought.17 It is feasible, though surprising, that the numbers of published works of ction increased from an average of 2 to 3 per year over most of the nineteenth century to closer to 50 per year in the rst decade of the new century, but the political causes for a 14

Shi Meng, Wan Qing xiaoshuo, 14. Chen Pingyuan, foreword to Chen and Xia, Ershi shiji zhongguo, 1. 16 See table and gures in Ouyang Jian, Wan Qing xiaoshuo shi, 4. The gures seem somewhat incredible, since they rise from only 3 publications in total in 1900, but are taken from Jiangsu Shehui Kexue Yuan, Editor-in-chief Yin Longyuan 尹龍元, Zhongguo tongsu xiaoshuo shumu tiyao 中國通俗小說書目提要, (Beijing: Zhongguo Wenlian, 1990), cited by various scholars. 17 For Ouyang, the reforms opened up court policies to unprecedented levels of debate and criticism, ushering in a period of active government—and of new ction. The new ction demonstrates an awareness of its era, of the abolition of civil service examinations, opportunities for studying abroad, reforms to the armed forces and law, railways and infrastructure, and all such changes in social, cultural and education spheres of life. See Ouyang Jian, Wan Qing xiaoshuo shi, 2–8. Accompanying the production high points was a shift in literary production away from the four categories of nineteenth-century ction (sentimental, gods and ghosts, historical, and detective ctions). 15

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9

rise in production that critics present give too little credit to printing and technological explanations. Cheaper, rapid printing and a reduction in the time lag between writing in manuscript and print publication, in a climate of ready access to presses, provide a further explanation of the number of works suddenly appearing in print which neat categorisations tend to overlook. In line with the ‘new ction’ meta-narrative adopted by early twentieth-century critics, the social and intellectual history surrounding ction of the last decade of the Qing has been of more immediate interest to Mainland historians than close study of the novels. Literary works are discussed in terms of new critical trends, or in the context of authors’ biographies, with literature deemed apolitical receiving less attention. A Ying, whose history of late Qing ction is one of the most highly regarded in any language, rapidly glosses over the pre-1900 period, and bases his chapter classications on socio-historical categories, most of which delineate literary reactions to particular political movements.18 One function of ascribing a sudden change in mentality to the politically aware writers of a narrowly-dened late Qing has been to evade the necessity of considering the didactic or reforming value of earlier works, precisely those qualities lauded in the new ction. Novels such as the many courtesan works could too easily be consigned to the bin of reading matter to while away leisure time. Since essentially the same conditions of foreign aggression, uprisings and weak government obtained during the writing of the earlier courtesan novels as in the last decades of the century, the question must remain for critics as to why authors earlier in the nineteenth century did not develop a more socially involved literature.19

18 A Ying’s list of the reasons for a proliferation of ction at the turn of the century includes printing developments, a realisation of the social importance of ction, and ction as a tool for urging reforms upon an impotent Qing government: A Ying 阿英, Wan Qing xiaoshuo shi 晚清小說史 (Beijing: Dongfang, 1996), 1–2. Shi Meng lists the ve aspects of this period of growth in works and the social inuence of literature as: news media carrying ction; the appearance of ction magazines; the emergence of specialist publishing societies; the formation of ranks of specialist/professional writers, and the broadcasting of a ourishing ction theory being broadcast. 19 A point which Ouyang Jian acknowledges, Wan Qing xiaoshuo shi, 3. Proponents such as Guo Yanli 郭延禮 who equate late Qing literature with social criticism and who are able therefore to set narrow bounds for the period, might still accept that the decay of the dynasty began before 1900, but argue that the true extent of Qing impotence was only seen after the Sino-Japanese war, and it was only then that late Qing literature ourished. Guo Yanli, Zhongguo jindai wenxue fazhan shi 中國近代文學發展史 ( Jinan: Shandong jiaoyu, 1995), Volume 2, 1146.

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For the purposes of this study, where the phrase ‘late Qing’ is used, it is a term of convenience usually replacing the more lengthy ‘second half of the nineteenth century and rst decade of the twentieth.’ It does not signify the politically inspired or socially engaged literature held to derive from the new ction theories appearing in journals from the late 1890s, nor does it denote ction of any particular genre in that time band. Red-light novels do not easily t into such a schema. A more convincing narrative of literary change looks not just at the contemporary and literary-historical political and social context, but at the texts in detail, their narrative structures and their production histories. The red-light ction studied in this volume runs parallel to the wider jindai time frame of around 1840 to 1910, and any development or shifts in the novels over that period can be used to rene the conventional understanding of the ‘late Qing.’ 1.2.2

Old, New and Modern

Denitions of the late Qing which have been based on a critical evaluation of ction, rather than ction theory, tend to describe a sharp polarity between ‘old’ and ‘new.’ Old encompasses all previous ideologies and derivative ction. New means politically charged, socially active ction, often drawing on western narrative structures. Fiction of the cross-over period reects the ‘semi-feudal’ and ‘semi-colonial’ situation of the Manchu government, where both the ideology and art of literature simultaneously held the new and old in tension. Fiction theory manifests the transitional nature of the era, an amalgam of the end of traditional theory based on preface writing, punctuation, commentary and emotive reactions, and the beginnings of a modern literary theory based on western concerns of plot and characterisation.20 Li Ruiteng writes of late Qing literary thought as both the conclusion of classical thinking and the source of a nationalistic new literature.21 The old is represented by the Tongcheng group and Wenxuan group and the thinking of Zhang Binglin, Wang Guowei, and Liu Shipei (themselves once considered avant-garde supporters of the incorporation of lowly ction into the literary canon), and the new by the reformists and the

20

Chen Pingyuan, Chen Pingyuan xiaoshuo shi lun ji (xia), 1404. Li splits Qing literary discourse into two major sections, “The summing up of classical literary ideology” and “The production of new literary ideology.” Li Ruiteng, Wan Qing wenxue sixiang lun, 108, 2; cf. Chen Pingyuan, Chen Pingyuan xiaoshuo shi lun ji (xia), 1404. 21

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ideologies of literary revolution, of the baihua movement and the poetry revolution. Where literary critics had once been counter-current thinkers, new ction critics became mainstream: a change in the status of theorists accompanying that of theory and ction itself.22 While denitions of literary periods furnished research projects in China, modernity and the modern preoccupied critics in the West. Debates on the late Qing and on modernity merge into one another. The subject of modernity attained a certain status as the topic of debate on the late Qing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as it was when May Fourth was in critical vogue. At times arguments have again approached the circular, academics seeking to describe modernity by elucidating aspects of a period newly designated as modern. Scholars have implicitly subscribed to a debate which leaves the sense of the term ambiguous, both a period designation and a type of literature.23 Modern Chinese literature was a twentieth-century phenomenon. Modern literature courses in western universities began with the short stories of Lu Xun written after 1918, following the convention where the roots of modern literary consciousness were considered to lie in the late Qing, with modern literature developing soon after. Modernity for some critics has described a very specic phenomenon: novels of social satire rooted in an anti-traditional stance. The origins of modern Chinese literature can be traced to the late Ch’ing period, more specically to the last decade and a half from 1895 to 1911, in which some of the ‘modern’ symptoms became increasingly noticeable . . . The emergence of late Ch’ing literature—particularly ction—was a by-product of journalism, which evolved out of a societal reaction to a series of deepening political crises.24

22 In arguing for a close link between literature and the times, Li contends that just as the late Qing was a period of crisis, crisis consciousness must be the main common theme in literature of the period. The basic question for late Qing literary research is therefore that of the relation between the old and the new. Li Ruiteng, Wan Qing wenxue sixiang lun, 7–8. From his starting point of literary ideologies, Li follows others in arguing that the real cross-over period (and hence periodisation of late Qing) was at the time of the Sino-Japanese war, before which the majority of scholars had lived and worked within traditional thought, but after which came qualitative as well as quantitative change, with the setting up of academies and study groups. 23 C.T. Hsia’s textbook A History of Modern Chinese Fiction remains a classic; Merle Goldman’s Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era continues the juxtaposition of modern and May Fourth, and Leo Ou-fan Lee’s synopsis of the period in the Cambridge History of China is entitled “The Quest for Modernity, 1895–1927” (see bibliography for references). 24 See Leo Ou-fan Lee in John K. Fairbank, ed., Cambridge History of China, Volume 12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 451–52.

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The breakthrough into modernity is created in this analysis by an understanding of the sick state of the nation and of its cure being a revolt against tradition. For other more recent critics too, the modern has equated to a concern for the national and for the cultural crisis threatening China.25 The rise of modern literature was for most of the twentieth century seen as part of the New Culture Movement, the anti-traditional having little to do with literary values or considerations, but more with socio-political conditions.26 Modern literature becomes a vehicle through which to voice discontent, and literary modernity a cultural phenomenon. Under this model, the diffusion as well as creation of the new ction takes its direction from the critical elite, beginning as a conscious effort to enlighten China’s masses about the need for reform, and emerging as an ideological imperative, a theoretical entity. Literature of the late Qing period is held by proponents of both ‘new ction’ and ‘modernity’ to exhibit an unprecedented breadth of reection on society and a critical, satirical stance: aspects which could, as will be seen, equally be applied to ction of a much lengthier late Qing.27 New and old are always relative terms: despite the advances its authors made in establishing a vernacular style, popular readership and viable writing profession, from the perspective of May Fourth writers the new ction of the late Qing already seemed old and was relegated to the corrupt world of tradition.28 In his monograph Fin-deSiècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911, David Der-wei Wang argues for the span of late Qing ction to be expanded

25 See e.g. Patrick Hanan, “Wu Jianren and the Narrator,” in Hu Xiaozhen ed., Shibian yu weixin, 550. 26 Lee, Cambridge History of China, Vol. 12, 451. 27 See e.g. Kang Laixin, Wan Qing xiaoshuo lilun yanjiu, 2. For Leo Ou-fan Lee, social satire is a major theme of late Qing ction, combined with a subjective awareness of the author’s own sentiments. Lee, Cambridge History of China Vol. 12, 452, 460, 463. 28 In a later article, “In Search of Modernity: Some Reections on a New Mode of Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Chinese History and Literature,” in Paul A. Cohen and Merle Goldman, eds., Ideas Across Cultures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), Lee renes his denition of modernism to a new mode of historical consciousness, based on a new conception of time and human progress. This modernity is specically of the May Fourth period, the qualitative difference lying in its “implicit equation of newness with a temporal continuum from the present to the future.” Newness was dened in the context of a western unilinear sense of time, with an awareness of one’s own epoch of paramount importance. Shanghai was the centre of this modernity, and urban life its focus. Lee goes on to discuss how the Chinese modernity differed from the western European one, but the article does not consider whether the tenets of modernity as described above appertained only to the early twentieth century, or were present in the late Qing.

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to include the second half of the nineteenth century.29 In a challenge to the paradigm which saw the May Fourth movement as the beginning of modern literature, Wang discerns signs of reform and innovation long before, arguing that these signs were incipient modernities, subsequently denied and repressed as the discourse of western modernity took over. During the late Qing ction was brought to bear on a range of public and private issues associated with modern times,30 and at this point issues of rationality, realism and revolution were rst addressed. By the time Yan Fu and Liang Qichao were proposing their reforms, “Chinese ctional convention had shown every sign of disintegrating and reinventing itself.”31 For Wang, what makes late Qing ction modern is its innovation and newness, situated within a multilingual, international exchange of ideas. China’s literary modernity was not just the sum of conditions which gave rise to it (such as calls for constitutional democracy, the discovery of psychologized and gendered subjectivity, industrialisation, the rise of an urban landscape, and the valorisation of time), but the effect of a competition of possibilities. In order to avoid seeing Chinese modernity as some reproduction of a western model, Wang looks at literary innovations which could have struck a westernised audience as original, a series of ‘repressed modernities’ which have been denied or displaced by readers, critics and historians.32 In demonstrating some of the striking innovations of late Qing ction in his thematic studies of sexuality, social values, justice and exile, David Wang’s work demonstrates fairly conclusively that the range and scale of literary innovation in the late Qing diminishes May Fourth claims to radical difference. This list of innovations will be added to in the chapters which follow below on characterisation, narrator and structure. There are problems, however, in privileging the framework of modernity above all other explanatory discourses. Wang’s modernity seems to require a realisation of it as such by its writers. As with Lee’s denition, it is a self-conscious turning from the old, but Wang himself acknowledges that writers of his repressed genres “never made it their goal to dene the modern or even to dene themselves as modern, as 29 David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 1. 30 Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor, 9–10. 31 Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor, 4. 32 Wang takes his examples from four repressed or neglected genres: depravity romance (i.e. red-light ction), chivalric and court-case ction, grotesque exposé and science fantasy.

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did highbrow literature.”33 Re-working the denition of modernity to t an earlier period, or even tting facets of a later period onto an earlier one and realigning the dating of the denition, does not greatly advance the debate. If modernity is, for example, primarily a self-reexive seeking to be modern, then the prize should remain with the May Fourth writers, but if it is more akin to the conditions of modernity, such as a more psychologized characterisation, then the late Qing should enjoy the honour of being the rst modern period in Chinese literature.34 Just as mainland Chinese analysts have been overly denitive in their periodisation of the late Qing, there is a danger of reducing the debate to one of terminology. Now that the scope and denition of the late Qing have been reassessed, it is unhelpful to continue to speak of the May Fourth period as a unied entity. Whether repressed modernities can equate to modernity aside, constituting imagined modernities as modern widens the debate by nessing denitions. The sharp divide between the two periods that earlier critics constructed has been broken down, and the new modernity debate needs to acknowledge the continuum of change in literary practices through the nineteenth century and on into the May Fourth era. Concentrating on individual texts of novels bypasses the perceived utility of demarcating periods and literary types. It also introduces a radically under-studied aspect of literature: the effects of individual editions on studies of narrative. This volume argues throughout that each new edition of a text is important because of the new reading of the novel it sets before the public. In the case of many of the nineteenthcentury novels, the original date of composition is far removed from either the rst printed publication or the rst public critical appraisals of a work, and any use of a particular novel as evidence of modernity would have to choose one of these three processes as its dening mode. Those promoting forms of modernity have not always made clear whether these refer to narrative methods, or include extrinsic factors of production. Narrative modernities predated but also coalesced with changes in the status of ction in the late nineteenth century, and the demarcation of a literary effect based on one or the other is difcult to sustain.

33

Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor, 21. Many of these effects are notably concentrated in the very late Qing, or late Qing of the narrower denition, further complicating the positioning of modernity. 34

text and context 1.3

15

Raising Fiction

While the zeal of those who sought to use ction to galvanise the educated and semi-educated towards political reform may have had little effect on authors writing of a more decadent pace of life in pleasure gardens or urban brothels, one aspect of the literary revolution had an impact on all novels: the drive to raise the status of ction in society. This was evidently a propaganda move with a purpose on the part of the reformers, but its backwash reached even red-light ction. As Chen Pingyuan writes, now that novels were not just for after tea or alcohol, it was worth the effort for authors to write books.35 As morally useful works, they no longer needed to sit on a back burner (as Chen Sen’s early red-light work Pinhua baojian did for decades) while authors engaged in more productive activities. The rise in the status of ction in general is one explanation for the diminishing time between writing and publishing and greater authorial involvement in the publishing process towards the end of the Qing. The importance of changes in the meaning of the terms wenxue 文學 and xiaoshuo to the writing and reception of works of ction is difcult to overstate. Wenxue, one of the four categories of learning tested by the state and on which rested the future of the empire in its selection of ofcials, had referred to humane letters in general—excluding ction— but came to refer more closely to literature in the western sense in the years after 1895.36 Whatever the exact timing, forms of written expression which had come under the designation wen were being sectioned 35

Chen Pingyuan, Chen Pingyuan xiaoshuo shi lunji (xia), 1415. See Theodore Huters, “A New Way of Writing: The Possibilities for Literature in Late Qing China, 1895–1908,” in Modern China, Volume 14, No 3: 243–376 ( July 1988), esp. 245, 243. As C.T. Hsia points out, the category of xiaoshuo itself had included not just novels and short classical tales, but drama and prosimetric narratives—i.e. all imaginative literature except regulated poetry. See Hsia, “Yen Fu and Liang ch’i-ch’ao,” in C.T. Hsia on Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 225. A similar evolution in the English term literature occurred during the eighteenth century, when the word began to signify what is now termed imaginative ction or creative writing, stressing the genres of poetry, prose ction and drama. See René Wellek, “What is Literature?,” in Paul Hernadi, ed., What is Literature? (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978), 16–23; Raymond Williams, Keywords (reprint, London: Fontana, 1983), 184–88. Williams discusses the change in meaning from “polite learning through reading” in the fourteenth century to its nineteenth-century connotation of the ability to read and the condition of being well-read, through to the specialization of literature into various types of writing. The emergence of the notion of imaginative literature was closely connected to the rise of aesthetics, and was accompanied by a slow rise in the prestige of the novel. 36

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off, as the newly valorised eld of wenxue began to have huge social demands invested in it. A major aspect of this reformulation of literature was the centrality of xiaoshuo, or ction, to the debate. Histories of the development in use of the term xiaoshuo from early China to the Kangxi dictionary of the mid-Qing and onwards are plentiful, and several attempts have been made to describe the interweaving of its various meanings with the changing status of ction.37 During the late Qing xiaoshuo gradually came to mean narrative or descriptive ction, and acquired the status of wenxue at a time when that concept was itself undergoing heavy revision. This was in part a post factum acknowledgement that what was termed xiaoshuo in the world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ction was already removed from the traditional pieces categorised under the philosophy or history sections of encyclopaediae, and had gradually come to mean “narrative literature with characters and plot.”38 Theorists recognised that taking xiaoshuo to be literature not only affected the meaning of literature, but also the way in which ction and novels should be treated critically. While even recent critics have claimed that “in the past, traditional Chinese intellectuals despised all ction outright,”39 the moral earnestness and literary skills which had earned late Ming vernacular novels serious critical attention enabled Qing writers to draw on their achievements, and eventually to parody this attention.40 37 On critical categories see Piet van der Loon, “On the transmission of Kuan-tzu,” in T’oung Pao 41: 358–366 (1952); on the history of the term xiaoshuo and reasons for the particular raising of status of ction in the late Qing see also Kang Laixin, Wan Qing xiaoshuo lilun yanjiu, 4–8; for more detailed synopses see Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 39–52; on late Qing understandings of the term xiaoshuo see C.T. Hsia’s essay “Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-ch-ao as Advocates of New Fiction,” reprinted in C.T. Hsia, On Chinese Literature; on the changing meaning of xiaoshuo and new theories of ction at the turn of the century, cf. Shu-ying Tsau, “The Rise of ‘New Fiction,’ ” in Dolehelová-Velingerová, ed., The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century, esp. 22–33; a useful overview of the term xiaoshuo from Zhuangzi to the twentieth century is also given by Daria Berg, in “What the Messenger of Souls has to Say: New Historicism and the Poetics of Chinese culture,” in Michel Hockx and Ivo Smits, eds., Reading East Asian Writing (London: RoutledgeCurzon 2003), 176–180. On the status of ction through to the late Qing see also Henry Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator: Chinese Fiction from the Traditional to the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 177–187. 38 Huang Jinzhu, 3–4. 39 Liu Ts’un-yan, ed., Chinese Middlebrow Fiction: from the Ch’ing and Early Republican Eras (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1984), 2. 40 On the seriousness with which Ming ction writers viewed their work, Hegel writes “One can only conclude that those seventeenth-century novelists . . . viewed the

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Discussion and dissent continued throughout the nineteenth century over the meaning of literature and the place of ction within it, with a signicant increase in the printed output of the debate with the thirty or so new ction magazines of the late Qing.41 Scholars such as Liu Shipei and Zhang Binglin developed arguments for writing ction into the literary canons, and for a new theoretical mode to allow for its study. Although the rise of ction affected all categories of writing, not all of the new critics who championed ction recognised all of its forms. Those such as Yan Fu and Liang Qichao who treated ction as a serious enterprise but who saw it primarily as a tool of social reform and education, still stressed the frivolity and inappropriateness of earlier novels and novellas.42 The book-buying public, however, voted with their silver, and although many writers of the new generation were unwilling to reject publicly the notion of writing in order to teach, after the 1911 revolution few wrote the overtly didactic tomes the reformers had advocated.43 This provides a curious parallel to the experiences of red-light authors earlier in the century, paying prefatory lip-service to didacticism. Re-evaluation of the place of ction within literature at the end of the nineteenth century was part of a broader re-conguration in the hierarchy of genres. Genre congurations are a key issue in canon formation,44 and the redenition of literature offered plenty of scope to those who sought to re-categorise texts, and in doing so to imprint their own authority on the process. The old canon, with its social and pedagogic motivations, nurturing an elite who could enter the civil service with an understanding of the ethical and aesthetic values of the

novel as a serious exercise in writing, one requiring careful planning and deliberateness in execution, a vehicle worthy of the most profound political, social and psychological insights.” Robert Hegel, The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 223. 41 On the debates in the new ction magazines and among the reformers on the purpose of ction, publishing in the concessions, professional authors and the promotion (in wenyan) of new ction, see Shu-ying Tsau, “The Rise of ‘New Fiction’ ” in Dolehelová-Velingerová, ed., The Chinese Novel. Material on the debates has been usefully collated by A Ying in his three-volume Wan Qing wenxue congchao 晚清文學叢鈔 (Beijing: Zhonghua 1960). 42 Huters, “A New Way of Writing,” 262. Cf. Dolehelová-Velingerová, The Chinese Novel, 6–7; Wang, Fin-de-siècle splendor, 14. 43 Cf. Chen Pingyuan, Chen Pingyuan xiaoshuo shi lunji, 1406. 44 Haruo Shirane, “Canon Formation in Japan: Genre, Gender, Popular Culture, and Nationalism,” in Hockx and Smits, eds., Reading East Asian Writing, 23.

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traditions it encapsulated,45 was rendered redundant with the abolition of government exams in 1905. The canonizing process which had kept courtesan novels out of favour might now have valued them, except that the ction being elevated was largely an unformed, potential ction, the carcass of the popular novel form with a socially inspiring stufng. One or two of the courtesan novels, as will be seen, fell into the category of the newly favoured, while the rest had to wait until the continuing process of canon formation in the twentieth century began to validate classical ‘social and human sentiment’ novels. 1.4

The ‘Courtesan Novel’ and its Reading History

Situated in the midst of this maelstrom of cultural and literary change, notions of ‘the courtesan novel’ as a conceptual entity seem increasingly misplaced. A work such as Jiu wei gui of 1906 was created under a very different understanding of the term ction than Fengyue meng half a century earlier, within a different set of textual and editorial relations, and with a new range of narrative possibilities developed in the last decades of the era. During the span of rst publication of the six novels studied, the new gravitas that xiaoshuo took on, as purveyor of morals and hope to the masses, inevitably affected the reception of both new and republished novels. Works written to satirise an author or amuse his friends embraced very different values to those which later parodied the brothel industry or offered insider guides to its world for would-be clients. The reading history of the red-light works over the twentieth century reects the preoccupations of literary critics: to support the value of ction by excluding contentious works, to provide politically acceptable readings of what were deemed feudal and depraved practices, to categorise by genre in literary studies, or to impose genre through editorial policy. To see how the courtesan novel has been regarded to date, this section looks rst at how denitions of red-light works have been arrived at, assesses how Mainland critics have dealt with the novels over the last century, and then considers how the textual histories of the novels interact with a reading of genre. How we might want to re-consider the grouping of red-light novels, and whether there is any textual or narrative justication (or value) in seeing the works as a set, is discussed more fully in Chapter Four. 45 See Pauline Yu, “Canon Formation in Late Imperial China,” in Huters, Wong, Yu, eds., Culture and State in Chinese History, 85, 90.

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‘Courtesan novel’46 is a term of convenience which usually translates xiaxie xiaoshuo, as used by Lu Xun in A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. Lu Xun lists and analyses four works from the mid- to late nineteenth century, forming his group on the basis of the novels’ content. Like the term ‘late Qing,’ the notion of a corpus of courtesan or xiaxie novels has existed for some time in the minds of Chinese and western literary critics, though without consensus on exactly which works should be included, and little debate as to the criteria for inclusion.47 Filiation among courtesan novels is visible in a generic titular similarity: with allusions to brothels in ‘dream’

46 Lu Xun, Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe 中國小說史略 (Beijing: Beiyang, 1925), 295. The Yangs translate xiaxie as ‘novels about prostitution:’ see Lu Hsun, A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1976), 319. The term, which has the connotation ‘wayward,’ originally referred to the meandering alleys of the pleasure quarters where professional prostitution was contained: see Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor, 53. ‘Novel’ itself is a term used consistently as the default option in western writings on traditional Chinese ction. Here ‘novel’ is used as shorthand denoting something like: ‘vernacular ction with traditional narrative markers, often around sixty hui 回 in length.’ It is not my intention to argue here for the commensurability of terminology and literary form in Chinese and western prose narrative works, and use of the term novel does not imply that xiaoshuo can be assessed in terms of western novel theory. Cf. Andrew Plaks, “Full length Hsiao-shuo and the Western Novel: A Generic Reappraisal” in William Tay et al., eds., China and the West: Comparative Literature Studies (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1980), 163–176. Plaks was at the forefront of those who hold that Chinese and western novels are members of the same generic class, in spite of their divergence in structure, characterisation and literary history. The features of Chinese novels that Plaks draws out do not adequately characterise the courtesan works however, any more than the features of these works t classic western denitions of the traits of a novel. An analysis of courtesan xiaoshuo as novels serves to highlight the disparities between the two: it is probably more useful to consider the works in terms of narrative theories (Chinese or Western) without the restrictions that genre terminology imposes. 47 Lu Xun’s original list in his chapter “Novels about Prostitutes in the Qing Dynasty” in Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe, published 1923, lists Pinhua baojian, Huayue hen, Qinglou meng and Haishang hua liezhuan. These novels, with the occasional addition of Fengyue meng, Haishang fanhua meng or Jiu wei gui 九尾龜 form the basis for example lists of the genre by 1990s critics or literary historians such as Zhang Peiheng 章培恒, Zhongguo wenxue shi 中國文 學史 (Shanghai: Fudan Daxue, 1996); Guo Yanli, Zhongguo jindai wenxue fazhan shi, and Tao Muning 陶慕寧, Qinglou wenxue yu Zhongguo wenhua 青樓文學與中國文化 (Beijing: Dongfang, 1993). Fengyue meng was unknown at the time, and may be retroactively added to Lu Xun’s group. A fuller list of around fty mid- to late Qing xiaxie novels appears in Wu Liquan 吳禮權, Zhongguo yanqing shi 中國言情時 (Beijing: Shangwu, 1995), though the author concludes that only Pinhua baojian, Huayue hen, Qinglou meng, Haishang hua liezhuan, Niehai hua 孽海化 and Jiu wei gui have any real value in a history of Chinese novels. Sun Kaidi 孫楷第, the premier critic and list-maker, lists eleven novels under the category xiaxie in his Zhongguo tongsu xiaoshuo shumu 中國通俗小說書目 (Tokyo: KyÖko Shoin, 1984) 129–132: all those listed above and four additional, relatively late, works: Huifang lü 繪芳綠, Haishang qing tian ying 海上慶天影, the incomplete Lei zhu yuan 泪珠緣 and Haishang hong xueji 海上鴻雪記. For a fuller discussion of the divisions within the group of novels made by Lu Xun and later commentators, see Chapter Four below.

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or ‘ower’ appearing in each of the following: Qinglou meng, Fengyue meng, Huayue hen, Pinhua baojian, Haishang hua liezhuan, and Haishang fanhua meng, 海上繁華夢, among many others.48 Many of the authors of red-light works also wrote and published in other genres, such as biji jottings or prose essays, and their authorship gives no necessary clue to content. Not least among the problems in classifying the texts is the vast divergence within this supposedly homogeneous group. Even when content is taken as the rationale for inclusion there is a great range in focus, from the gender issues surrounding the boy actors of Pinhua baojian to the romantic aura of the harem of Qinglou meng, through to the explorations of street life in turn-of-the-century works. In the present volume, the term ‘red-light’ is favoured, tying the literature to the brothel locus, and avoiding the gendered aspect of the term courtesan novel. (Since the literature is just as much about male representations, ‘client ction’ might be a suitable alternative). The selection of six particular novels for study does not imply that they constitute a genre, or represent the most typical exemplars. In keeping with the argument of this volume, there is a textual reasoning behind the choice: the six novels studied are the most frequently encountered of the works which might be included under a red-light label, with the highest textual visibility and availability, most editions and reprints.49 While the modern western critics who have begun to raise the prole of red-light novels in English-language scholarship have concentrated on questions such as desire, the representation of women, the relationship between a proliferation of courtesan novels and Qing codes of sexuality, the social history of the courtesan, opium, or Wu dialect texts, these trends run counter to the majority of twentieth-century readings. The history of reading courtesan novels, as suggested above, has been dictated more by political than narrative conventions. Although ction may have been newly valorised in the early twentieth century, red-light works remained beyond the stentorian reach of the critic. After Lu Xun’s institution of the category of xiaxie novels, the works were relegated to a critical silence

48 On the prevalence of ‘Shanghai’ in the titles of a set of turn-of-the-century redlight novels, see Catherine Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910 (Washington, DC: University of Washington Press, 2006), 252. 49 I am grateful to Glen Dudbridge for the suggestion of ‘red-light ction’ as a neutral translation for xiaxie The textual availability argument works with the possible exception of Fengyue meng, which was ‘rediscovered’ relatively late and so has few intermediate editions. Two other novels which are becoming increasingly visible as editions and in critical studies are Haishang qingtian ying and Haishang hong xueji.

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for most of the last century, or rapidly dismissed where they surfaced in literary histories. Some analyses have been so cursory as to be formulaic, an act of alignment with the current school of criticism. The poor press that xiaxie novels received following their appearance in the mid-nineteenth century was an inevitable outcome of conating moral purity with aesthetic value. The emergence of red-light works was linked in the standard Mainland critical works to the corruption of the Qing dynasty, which was seen as pushing young intellectuals with no outlets for their talents into the brothels. Courtesan ction has not always been so described: as Guo Yanli writes, there have been works about prostitutes from Tang chuanqi (傳奇) onwards, but the prostitutes of these earlier works were represented as model women and faithful lovers. For critics such as Guo, the attitudes of the later, more lascivious, courtesans give the works their generic title.50 The paucity of scholarly work on the subject which obtained until very recently51 is testimony to the unquestioned authority of Lu Xun, and linked to the perceived salaciousness of the novels. The presentation of women in their guises as seductress, shrew and victim, has fallen foul of reigning ideologies. Use of the term xiaxie as a literary category, and the connotations it has come to hold, have pushed these—usually chaste—individual works to the margins of acceptability for the reading public. Broad consensus followed Lu Xun’s assessment of the works as entertainment with happy endings, akin to earlier romantic stories but set in the prostitute quarters “because readers were bored by meeting characters like Baochai and Daiyu time and again in settings like the Daguan garden.”52 The historical value of the texts is cited as reason for their inclusion in anthologies or histories: though these works are “of little literary value” and “poor morality,” they reect the history, customs and attitudes of late Qing society,53 and are important to scholars on account of their “wide dissemination, inner consistency and voluminous numbers.”54 Commentators concur that although the courtesan novels are of little

50

Guo Yanli, Zhongguo jindai wenxue fazhan shi, 456. There are, for example, very few articles related to xiaxie novels even in journals which specialize in Qing ction, such as Ming Qing xiaoshuo yanjiu 明清小說研究. The surge in interest in, for example, detective or gongan 公安 ction has only just begun to fade in favour of courtesan works. Over the last 4–5 years the number of articles has rocketed: see Chapter Three below for a fuller list of recent works. 52 Lu Xun, Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe, 306–307. 53 Wu Liquan, Zhongguo yanqing xiaoshuo shi, 32. 54 Tao Muning, Qinglou wenxue yu Zhongguo wenhua, 216. 51

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literary value, a history of yanqing 言情 (romance) works should devote a few pages to the subject on account of their historical insights. There is agreement on the source and cathartic function of xiaxie novels, written as “comforting illusions for frustrated literati,”55 unable to reect the real lives of prostitutes and therefore base in style. Only Haishang hua liezhuan escapes this generic condemnation and is singled out for its realism. By realistic depiction, the critics have usually meant that the work shows up the worst qualities of the vilied Qing. Courtesan novels were born, this version of literary history proclaims, out of the indecision and dejection of late nineteenth-century intellectuals, as catharsis for scholars whose talents were unused and unrewarded, a line reiterated by some recent western critics.56 This promotion of courtesan novels as escapism for failed examinees is rarely attested to by the texts, and requires speculative use of extra-textual sources, including prefaces or reading notes, to sustain the supposition. Though the political overtones are fairly transparent in much criticism, this narrative has been repeated, even in the work of recent and well-respected critics, to the point where it has taken on a truth-value of its own. Challenges include Tao Muning’s argument that Lu Xun’s chronology is over-simple in the three-stage transformation he sees in the genre, from excessive praise ( yimei 溢美) of the prostitutes, through a relatively realistic phase to excessive disgust ( yi’e 溢惡) towards the prostitutes, and also Patrick Hanan’s claim for a bifurcation of the genre, but studies intent on plotting a genre can still rely on widespread acceptance of Lu Xun’s premises.57 This volume takes seriously the novels’ own view of the works as literature. Justication for doing so, if such were needed, can be found in the texts’ own approach to the nature of writing, and in the contingencies of their subsequent

55

See e.g. Zhang Peiheng and Luo Yuming, eds., Zhongguo wenxue shi (xia), 612. See e.g. Martin W. Huang, Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2001), 37–38, where he writes “It was not unusual for those frustrated in their careers to seek solace in the arms of a courtesan.” Ellen Widmer writes of Zhan Kai’s courtesan sketches: “As with Wang Tao and other practitioners of this type of writing, such sketches were a way of coming to terms with the writer’s own estrangement in late Qing Shanghai,” in “Inecting Gender: Zhan Kai/Siqi Zhai’s ‘New Novels’ and Courtesan Sketches,” Nan nü 6.1: 136–168 (2004), 144. Neither Huang nor Widmer provide documentary evidence to show that visits to courtesans (even for literary purposes) were any more frequent than for contented ofcials in post. 57 See Tao Muning, Qinglou wenxue yu Zhongguo wenhua, 217. On the theory of two streams of courtesan novels and recent readings of the novel Fengyue meng by Patrick Hanan, see below, Chapter Four. 56

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publishing history. At a time when vernacular works were still not a highly valorised branch of literature,58 in the complexity of their narratives the courtesan novels stake their claim in the movement to reconstitute literature as imaginative ction. 1.4.1

Editions and Texts: The Modern ‘Courtesan Novel’

The long critical silence on red-light novels throughout the twentieth century was accompanied by an absence of texts: after publication of many of the manuscripts in the late Qing, reprints were made frequently until the 1930s, and then sporadically until the 1990s. The earlier novels represent some of the last texts to enjoy long circulation in manuscript form, and the later ones some of the rst to be published serially in the new literary journals. The drift towards an artistic autonomy of the text began around the 1890s, with works like Haishang hua liezhuan, published in the author’s own literary journal, entering generalised critical discourse as products rather more distinct from the author-gure than traditional criticism could accommodate. Texts with the names of authors or pseudonyms attached begin to appear around the turn of the century, and the explanatory powers of editorial biographies begin to encroach on, and eventually displace, authorial prefaces.59 The publication of many Qing red-light novels in the 1990s as selfcontained entities, with modern punctuation and textual divisions, often shorn of prefaces and annotations, raises the issue of the degree of kinship of these novels with those published during their authors’ lifetimes, a question considered in more detail in Chapter Four. The reception of the modern texts is clearly governed by a plethora of social factors (composition of reading public, scale of availability of reprinted versions, status of ction in modern society, contemporary modes of reading etc.) but is also altered by their repackaging: the author’s name, for example is present on the cover, but the ties with the historical author and the meaning of that term are irrevocably changed. If we accept, following Ricouer and Chartier, that meaning is dependent upon the form in which a text is

58 See e.g. Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), Chapter 1, “Language and Narrative Model,” esp. 4–6, for a discussion on the functions of vernacular literature. 59 On the use of the author’s name and its signications, see Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Josué V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structural Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, UK version Methuen, 1979), 147–8.

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received, that a reader actualises a text in a historical dimension,60 then the issue of reprinting with substantial changes to format merits attention. Not only does the realisation of the text by the reader change over time, but the text created by the author has itself changed signicantly. The formats of the modern editions make courtesan novels indistinguishable from reprints of many other classical literature styles—in a similar manner to the way in which the commodication of texts at the end of the Qing brought categories of popular ction closer to mainstream works of literature—creating the sense that any pre-modern work is part of the entity ‘classical literature.’ Recent reprinting of the novels has brought to the fore the issue of classication, and illuminated some of the contradictions in current usage of genre (lei 類) terminology. The premise that these novels should be viewed as a series of works, in contradistinction to the literary greats such as Honglou meng or Rulin waishi 儒林外史 (The Scholars), with which they are frequently compared in negative terms, is sustained by the presentation of the novels. A similar jacket design, typeface and format create a physical resonance reinforced by a series title and discussions on classication in the prefaces. The mini-canon instituted by Lu Xun and reproduced in subsequent literary histories has reafrmed its validity in the publishing mechanisms of the 1990s. To take an example: the Shanghai Classics Publishing House, one of the major commercial publishers of pre-twentieth century vernacular works, has reprinted a series of late imperial novels under the heading “Ten Great Classical Social Human-sentiment Novels” (十大古代社會人情小說), which includes ve novels depicting courtesans.61 The editors of the series of Social Human-sentiment Novels acknowledge the confusion which reigns in terminology, pointing to deeper issues of literary criticism. They write, in a publishing note which graces the rst page of each book in the series: The division into schools of traditional Chinese ction has all along been rather confused. Even if we discount the differences regarding the divisions

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Roger Chartier, The Order of Books (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 3. As Chartier writes, “forms produce meaning and . . . a text, stable in its letter, is invested with a new meaning and status when the mechanisms that make it available to interpretation change.” 61 The other ve in this series, which complements the publisher’s two other series of ten castigatory (qianze 譴責) and ten sinister (black screen, heimu 黑幕) novels, comprise three scholar-beauty (caizi jiaren) romances and two early Qing novellas set in previous dynasties. The evolutionary connections between caizi jiaren stories and courtesan novels are considered below.

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into schools between Luo Ye 羅燁 of the Song and Hu Yinglin 胡應麟 of the Ming, opinions also vary in recent times, with many voices dissenting over the naming of social human-sentiment novels in particular. Lu Xun in his A Brief History of Chinese Fiction made divisions entitled Human-sentiment novels,’ ‘Red-light novels,’ ‘Satirical novels,’ ‘Castigatory novels;’62 and also ‘life sentiment books.’ The Japanese Shiyonoya 鹽谷溫 has called them genjô shôsetsu 言情小說 ‘speaking sentiment novels.’ Hua Zhongshe 華仲麝 divided them up into ‘amorous sentiment novels’ and ‘social novels’. Apart from these there are also such titles as ‘amorous novels,’ ‘scholar-beauty novels and ‘obscene novels.’ For these divisions, there is not a single unied standard, some take the theme or content as a base, other take the standpoint of the author as their base; it is very difcult to use these methods of division to classify a given novel. However, no matter from what angle we discuss it, these novels all to a greater or lesser degree reected society (what Lu Xun called ‘life sentiment’) and reected human emotions (which Lu Xun called ‘noting human affairs’). They all took their material from daily life, were based upon reality, and, in the descriptions of the true sentiments and real feelings of characters in the book, were found the social and human visions of the author. For these reasons, we have called them collectively ‘social human-sentiment novels.’

This inclusivist editorial approach seems to question the whole issue of classication but then withdraws and leaves the edice intact. The perceived pre-eminence of certain texts63—almost always a result of retroactive critical assessment—has worked against a balanced analysis of other vernacular texts, and in particular this stratum of ‘lewd’ vernacular works. The revered classics at the apex of the Chinese ctional storehouse are supported by a layer of classical works differentiated by literary type, often concurring with a dynastic period, and below them, sets of vernacular novels boxed according to genre. The modern industry of literary criticism is not so far from its imperial roots. Those works which achieve prominence gain respect, and the cycle perpetuates itself. 62 The terms are translated by Gladys Yang and Yang Hsien-yi as ‘Novels of Manners,’ ‘Novels about Prostitution,’ ‘Novels of Social Satire’ and ‘Novels of Exposure.’ See the Contents list, Lu Hsun, A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. 63 This concept is entrenched in Chinese and western accounts. Andrew Plaks, for example, equates genre with selected high-impact texts, and writes of “the great novels,” in contrast to “the innumerable works in both traditions which fail to develop a dimension of intellectual depth [and which] must of necessity be considered either as minor examples of the genre or else as works which fall outside of these generic criteria.” (Plaks, Four masterworks 168.) The prefaces to the Shanghai Classics series readily ascribe literary merit and demerit, making explicit comparisons between their ‘social human-sentiment’ novels and two of the great ones: “Although these novels can in no way rival Rulin waishi or Honglou meng, at the same time as they continued the novelistic format and content of the late Ming and early Qing, there were also new breakthroughs.”

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This happened to scholar-beauty (caizi jiaren) works, and is beginning with red-light works such as Qinglou meng or Huayue hen: having achieved a certain status through generic promotion, the latter are now beginning to be studied as individual texts. The classication of red-light works into a category has had several effects, one of which was to promote the escapism version of their history outlined above. Another has been to ensure the availability of individual texts because of their inclusion in a high-visibility, categorisable group. Ever since Lu Xun conceived of the group, critics have regarded redlight novels in terms of their classication, especially in anthologies and literary histories.64 Inclusion in anthologies is a factor in the canonisation and continued transmission of these texts: the publication in the 1990s not only of cheap popular editions but also annotated or scholarly editions of several of the works bears this out. The cultural value of texts in a canon lies not in the text itself, but is derived from the processes and institutions that give the texts value, consequently the very act of reprinting courtesan novels by the major publishing houses specialising in classical texts grants status, even without critical approval.65 The supposition of generic similarity that literary histories, as well as the modern series publications, have established has yet to be tested in a reading of narrative. In constituting the works as a group the critics have imposed reading patterns and implied patterns of composition. This classicatory approach may present a valid judgement on a rather formulaic sub-class of novels, but needs substantiating by reference to the texts. In the ‘inferior’ genres the contribution of the topos is arguably greater and the

64

See e.g. Zhang Peiheng and Luo Yuming, eds., Zhongguo wenxue shi, 610, where Pinhua baojian, Qinglou meng and Huayue hen are discussed alongside Haishang hua liezhuan in a section headed ‘Haishang hua liezhuan and general novels on sing-song girls.’ In Guo Yanli’s history of jindai literature Zhongguo jindai wenxue fazhan shi the above three are placed in a section entitled ‘Long works on actors and prostitutes’ (492) and Haishang hua in a separate category with other Wu dialect works. 65 Cf. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 4, 10, 55 and passim. The justication for publication given in the modern red-light prefaces, that of the educational needs of the young, is precisely a marker of distinction between non-canonical and canonised texts. Shirane notes that one of the key distinctions between canonised and non-canonical texts is that the former are the object of extensive commentary and exegesis and are used widely in school text-books, which non-canonical texts or genres are not, no matter how popular. Shirane, “Canon Formation in Japan,” 33–34. Assignation of genre is a valuative act on the part of the interpreter: the history of the grouping together of these works speaks of the aesthetic values commentators have attributed to them. Adena Rosmarin, The Power of Genre (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 35.

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role of creative personality weakened, with the expectations of the reading public much clearer.66 The need to consider the novels as individual texts has been made more pressing by the production patterns where, following critical and editorial promotion of serial similarity, the format of modern reprints has predisposed readers to particular expectations of the text. One of the aims of this study is to show how the differences between the novels, in spite of an apparent thematic and structural similarity, should thwart the genre-conditioned reader who expects certain situations or values to obtain throughout a given series of red-light texts. 1.5

Literary Ancestry: A Brief Survey

Having criticised the critics for their tendency to box novels into categories, it would be foolhardy to attempt to perform the same operation on red-light novels, or on their literary forebears. As one critic has written “It is not as if we can nd the forerunners of the novel by tracing back from a horse-like narrative to an eohippus-like narrative,” given that literary forms are not organised by genus and species.67 Rather than establish a genealogy of courtesan ction, it seems germane to consider the narrative and thematic sources whose inuence is seen across the novels. If we accept that there is a corpus of red-light novels, then a rich intratextual commentary can be seen among the novels. Beyond this, the works display a diverse set of relations to earlier ction in both narrative form and theme: in echo, imitation, reworking, parody. Novels centring on the extra-familial relations of courtesan and client inevitably tend to subvert conventions of earlier romantic genres, and draw on previous representations of courtesans, but the late Qing red-light works also delight in confounding expectations, in creating similarities in representation of character with novellas of chaste female heroines, and in debunking the mythical heroism of earlier prostitutes. Two major sources which redlight authors consistently invoke are Ming short stories with love themes,

66 Gerard Genette, “Structuralism and Literary Criticism” in David Lodge, ed., Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (London: Longman, 1988), 72. Jauss had earlier put forward the complementary view: “the more stereotypically a text repeats the generic, the more inferior is its artistic character and its degree of historicity.” Hans Robert Jauss, “Theories of Genre and Medieval Literature” in Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 89. 67 Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 4.

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and the popular later romances termed caizi jiaren, scholar-beauty stories. A third source without which any study of courtesan works would be impoverished is Cao Xueqin’s novel Honglou meng, the title of which is echoed throughout the titles of red-light ction. Other than in the case of this latter source, these inuences are secondary, or contributory, to the main narrative focus discussed over the next few chapters, that of the self-reexive ctionality of the texts. There are other novels which are much closer in time frame to the red-light works, and which have often been linked to these in literary studies, but whose narrative and thematic links are more tenuous. Critics have classied red-light novels together with novels of chivalry (xiayi 俠義; Lu Xun’s ‘novels of adventure and detection’ in translation) and with novels of exposure (qianze 譴責) in chronology-based histories.68 Tales of vengeance and justice, the chivalrous novels about popular heroes, which merged with detective stories in some late instances, are usually traced back to Shuihu zhuan 水滸傳, and like red-light works are frequently criticised in literary histories for their ‘feudal’ morality, but also fail on stylistic grounds, with accusations of too much dialogue and action, and too little reexivity. The novels of exposure which appear alongside red-light novels in chronological studies tend to belong to the narrowly dened late Qing period of the turn of the century. These novels, critical of social abuses and exhibiting a loss of faith in the Qing government, received a certain acclaim in the twentieth century, tempered by mention of their often exaggerated and rather blunt style. There was clearly crossfertilisation of red-light ction with these two contemporary modes of writing, but literary inuences for the courtesan novels are more readily found in earlier strands of ction. The thematic sources developed in Qing works are in many ways easier to trace than antecedent narrative patterns, and do not always derive from the same works. The red-light novels took over a variety of tropes and incorporated them with various modications into their own discourse; the degree of borrowing from different types and periods of writing undermines attempts made to create clear generic histories for red-light works. The courtesan angle produces an anomalous treatment of common themes: qing 情 (committed affection), for example, is often 68 See e.g. Zhang Peiheng, Luo Yuming, eds., Zhongguo wenxue shi, Volume 3, where the subgroup of prostitute works are classed alongside qianze novels as ‘Fiction of the later Qing period;’ or Guo Yanli, Zhongguo jindai wenxue fazhan shi, Vol. 1, where the two types are classed in a unit as “Fiction from the early jindai period.”

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tied in red-light novels to disabuse of illusion, waking from the dreams of one’s youth. Many of the paired relationships in the novels are constructed in terms of soulmates (zhi ji 知己) as in earlier romantic ction, but skew into variants on the happy ending tale, as a pastiche of earlier genres. Red-light works of the nineteenth century display a range of interests, from the narcissism of the male âneur to the corruption of the courts, the deviousness of self-deception, and new expressions of female autonomy, and the catholicity of their source material provides breadth and depth to the lives of the protagonists. 1.5.1

Love and Warnings: Lessons from Ming Short Stories

Elements of Qing red-light novels are pregured in the romantic strain of the Ming vernacular short story. Settings and story lines are reconstituted almost unaltered as stereotypical episodes in the longer late Qing works, and moral issues raised in Ming stories reappear as immanent ideologies in nineteenth-century novels. Tales of courtesans represent a high proportion of the San yan 三言 (Three Stories) collections,69 three seventeenth-century anthologies collated by Feng Menglong and published by his Ink-crazy Studio. Feng himself is known to have frequented the singing girl or brothel quarters in his youth. The story collections address a range of issues, from justice in the law courts, to maltreated exam candidates, to the perdies of lovers. “Popular in its time and lightly regarded by the very nature of that popularity,” the collections that Feng edited had a variety of sources in classical and vernacular tales, some potentially from the Song and Yuan, some with antecedents in oral performance.70 The stories enter directly into discourse with red-light novels in three areas: production, authority and content. That these particular areas span the role of the author as editor and anthologist, the creation and transmission of the story in the gure of the narrator, and the content of the stories in their treatment of women, shows the signicance of Feng Menglong’s legacy in shaping later ction.

69 Yushi mingyan 喻世明言 “Evident Stories to Enlighten the World” (which frequently appears as Gujin xiaoshuo 古今小說, “Stories Old and New”); Jingshi tongyan 警世通言, “Universal Stories to Warn the World” and Xingshi hengyan 醒世恒言, “Constant Stories to Awaken the World.” 70 Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Short Story, 1. On the origins of the short stories, see Chapter 8.

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Representations of women in Ming short stories give clues towards a reading of Qing women. A comparison of two tales from Feng’s 1620 collection, Gujin xiaoshuo No. 23, “Zhang Shunmei gains a beautiful wife during the Lantern Festival,” and Gujin xiaoshuo No. 24, “Yang Siwen meets an old acquaintance in Yanshan,” illustrates both features of narrative and contrasting views of women in Feng’s stories. These consecutive tales are ‘paired’ stories, seemingly put side-by-side in the collection for deliberate contrast.71 Although not among Feng’s courtesan tales, the two stories shed light on the tensions in later representations of courtesan women. Both stories begin with a prologue, or short opening tale, which sets the scene, frames the tale and acts as a commentary on the main story. In story No. 24, the prologue is a description of the annual inspection of lanterns at the Lantern Festival by the Song emperor Huizong. The main story begins with a description of the more provincial Yanshan lantern festival where the eponymous Yang is stationed. “Yang Siwen meets an old acquaintance in Yanshan” is a tale of a woman’s revenge for the indelity of her husband after her death, and shows unusual strength in a woman demanding reciprocity in virtue, chastity, and the strength of love within (and without) a marriage bond. The theme of love as strong as death is taken to its (super)natural extreme: if there really is a parallel mode of existence, where ghosts can interact with the human world, then perhaps it is wrong to expect a marriage vow to be dissolved in death. The tale is a twisted one: Yang recognises his old sworn brother’s wife, Ms Zheng, now acting as a lady-in-waiting, and snatches a quick conversation with her. She tells how, caught by barbarians when travelling, she was separated from her husband and sold off. To preserve her loyalty to her husband she attempted suicide, and still bore the scars. Later, when Ms Zheng’s husband passes through town, Yang is delighted to be able to reunite the separated lovers, but when Yang and the husband search for her, it becomes apparent that Ms Zheng is a troubled soul, an apparition. When her husband swears he will never remarry, and calls upon himself death by storm or bandits

71 See Shuhui Yang, Appropriation and Representation: Feng Menglong and the Chinese Vernacular Story (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1998), Chapter 3, “Ventriloquism through the Companion Story.” On the derivation of Gujin No. 24 and its classical Chinese antecedent sources, see Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Short Story, 175–177, 181, 186. Both this story (with its clear sources) and the “celebrated erotic story” No. 23 are classied by Hanan as “early” stories, i.e. pre- ca.1550.

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should he prove false, she is afraid for him, knowing his weakness. The husband goes to a convent to arrange a proper burial service for his wife, but he is instantly enamoured of the abbess he meets there. Soon he has forgotten the memorial service for his wife and is drinking with the beautiful abbess. After their union, the spirit of Ms Zheng takes over the ex-nun, and has to be exorcised. In performing this rite, a storm surges up, and both are killed, betrayal reaping its reward. Tale No. 23, “Zhang Shunmei gains a beautiful wife at the Lantern Festival,” linked thematically to No. 24 through the festival, tells a contrasting story of lovers who remain loyal during their three-year separation. Another strong-willed woman, the heroine falls in love with a stranger while out appreciating the lights, arranges a rendezvous and sleeps with him (some of the more explicit description is cut in later editions), agreeing to elope to secure their love. Her delicate feet prevent a rapid escape, and the couple are separated in the throng. She continues ahead, but Zhang assumes she will have remained within the crowded city walls. As the narrator points out, the woman has the good sense to cast aside a shoe near a water course to convince her parents she has drowned, which draws a note from the commentator: “in her actions, she shows talent and capability far superior to [Zhang] Shunmei.”72 Realising the straits she is in, alone and unprotected, the woman takes refuge in a nunnery, and concocts a viable story to tell the abbess to explain her presence. In this tale the abbess plays a positive role, giving shelter, interpreting the girl’s dreams, and acting as go-between for the couple when Zhang nally passes by and is espied through a window. Since Zhang has kept his vow not to marry after losing his ancée, but channelled his energies into studying for examinations, the couple are free to re-unite and to celebrate his subsequent honours and success. There are numerous structural echoes and contrasts between the two stories: in the separations while travelling, in the roles of the two nuns as destroyer and creator of marriages, in dreams and spirit-interaction, and in the signicance of mislaid objects.73 The prime contrast, however, is in the attitudes of the male and female protagonists towards their

72 Feng Menglong 馮夢龍, Quan xiang gujin xiaoshuo 全像古今小說 (Shanghai: Shangwu, 1947), 23/9a. 73 Objects are invested with narrative signicance in Feng’s short stories. Handkerchiefs, scarves to hide suicide scars, a casket of ashes which cannot be lifted until the mourners agree to proper burial rites, a pearl-sewn shirt whose uniqueness gives away its adulterous wearer—all link lovers in emotional affect and in plot strategy.

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lovers. Treachery, moral laxity and revenge, love, care and self-sacrice open up the narrative possibilities in male-female relationships. The taking and breaking of oaths is a recurrent point of tension in red-light ction, and much of the jealousy that destroys relationships is founded on earlier breaches of trust, as in tale No. 24. The complexity of emotion and motivation that Feng portrays sets a standard for judging the credibility of later representations of embittered women and duplicitous partnerships. The role of advisors—servants and friends—with higher moral standards than the protagonists, chance, inclement weather, bad luck, stratagems, wiles, patience, alcohol and the use of myth to persuade: these key elements to the stories are the building blocks of the lengthier red-light narratives. Although a sympathetic view of women prevails in many of Feng’s stories, women are still depicted as inherently unstable and liable to behavioural and mental vacillations. No explanation is merited where the actions of female characters are internally inconsistent. The theme of the ‘femme fatale,’ or qing guo qing cheng 傾國傾城, ‘woman whose looks could destroy a kingdom’ reects the thought “that women who pursue their own sexual desires have a catastrophic effect on family and society.”74 In Feng Menglong’s well-known story “The Oil Vendor and the Courtesan”75 from the Xingshi hengyan (Tales to awaken the world) collection, core elements of later biographies of young courtesans are pregured. These include the description of an accomplished and intelligent female child, versed in the ne arts of chess, calligraphy and painting, who suffers misfortune and the loss of parents and is sold into prostitution. War and banditry were frequent causes of orphaning, in this story during the siege of Kaifeng, in a nineteenth-century work such as Huayue hen due to Taiping armies. The girl’s appreciation of the wretchedness of her position is echoed in later novels by long soliloquies of educated female characters lamenting their lot.76 Having being tricked into losing her virginity, she is subjected to a long exposition on the nature of marriage, which concludes with the advice from her ‘aunt’

74 Anne E. McLaren, The Chinese Femme Fatale: Stories from the Ming period (Sydney: University of Sydney East Asian Series No. 8, 1994), 1. 75 ‘賣油朗獨占花魁.’ A translation by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang appears in G. Barmé, ed., Lazy Dragon: Chinese Stories from the Ming Dynasty (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co., 1981). 76 The case of Shuanglin 雙林 in Fengyue meng is discussed in Chapter Three below.

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to serve her mistress well for four or ve years, and then buy herself out into a happy marriage. The ingenuity of the courtesans in salting away earnings to redeem themselves gures in several nineteenth-century novels. The girl-prostitute’s threats of suicide, in “The Oil Vendor and the Courtesan,” if her madam refuses to release her on payment of the sale price, reect the ultimate, and sole, bargaining chip that the courtesans hold, and becomes an exceedingly common trope. The competitive ranking of women is common to their portrayal in both Ming tale and Qing novel. Among the beauties in “The Courtesan’s Jewel Box” ( Jingshi tongyan No. 32) is one Du Wei, ranked number ten among the capital girls, and thus named Du Shiniang 杜十娘; precisely the same ranking that Chizhu’s 痴珠 lover in Huayue hen holds, and which causes so much jocular rivalry. The image of a piece of awless jade falling by mistake among the dust of the earth in “The Courtesan’s Jewel Box” reappears as a leitmotiv running through works such as Qinglou meng, following its take-up in Honglou meng.77 The notion of a woman able to remain untarnished by her surroundings or profession because of her inner fortitude, seen in the more romantic strain of the red-light novel, draws on this tradition. The absence of parents—a continuous theme through the caizi jiaren stories and almost universal in red-light ction—allows young men to follow their inclinations, and leaves women open to exploitation. The tension between different presentations of women is intensied by discrepancies in the gure of the narrator: between the voices of the prologue and the main story, and between the gures of narrator, author and commentator. The opening lines in the rst story in Feng’s collection, “The Pearl-sewn Shirt,” present one such opportunity for multiple readings: An occasional affair on the spur of the moment with some ‘wayside ower and willow’ brings little harm, but never hatch deliberate plans against all decency to seek some momentary gratication at the expense of the long-standing marriage of others. How would you feel if your own dear wife or beloved concubine were to fall victim to another man’s seduction?78

77 Feng Menglong, “Du Shiniang nu chen baibao xiang” 杜十娘怒沉百寶箱, in Jingshi tongyan (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chuban, 1957), 486. 78 Translation from Feng Menglong, Stories Old and New: a Ming Dynasty Collection, trans. Yang, Shuhui and Yunqin Yang (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2000), 9.

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The story itself illustrates the retribution that comes to the man who outs this injunction, but also the lesser ‘harm’ that comes to the woman who is seduced into an affair. Justice, and the meting out of retribution are fundamental to the logic of the stories, but while males of the scholar class may be excused the occasional sin, punishment for women is more likely to be harsh and immediate. The divers and mutually incompatible attitudes towards women rife in Qing red-light works can be seen as a heritage of this combination of a profound sympathy with misused women coupled with a benign view of the system of court(esan)ship. The notion of writings on love as a righteous force within society, in providing a warning against amoral behaviour, took hold in the Ming and is fundamental to the ostensible presentation of Qing courtesan works. The archetypal warning-and-exposition pattern of narrative is presented in a second compilation attributed to Feng Menglong, the Qingshi leilüe 情史類略 (“Classied outline of the history of qing,” or “Anatomy of love.”)79 The Qingshi provided a wealth of anecdotes and illustrations for later authors on the theme of qing, which emerges as one of the primary concerns of nineteenth-century red-light literature.80 In his preface, Feng outlines his vision of a society of greater qing, his purpose to “change an absence of qing into a presence, to transform private qing into public qing,”81 and thereby to reform the base elements of society. The warning expounded in the preface to the Qingshi is a provisional one: “For those who may read it aright it may broaden their qing, for those who do not understand how to read it, [the stories] will still not lead them into licentiousness.” Similar attempts to circumvent the responsibilities of publishing potentially dangerous works, both in

79

The terms are Patrick Hanan’s, see The Chinese Vernacular Short Story, 95. Feng Menglong’s ideas on love and relationships arose in the context of the development in the late Ming of philosophies of individualism and spontaneity associated with Wang Yangming, and of a contemporary focus on the concept of qing and on the primacy of the relationship between husband and wife. A brief summary of the late Ming philosophical developments and background to the publication of the Qingshi leilüe is provided in Hua-yuan Li Mowry, Chinese Love Stories from ‘Ch’ing Shih’ (Connecticut: Archon Books, 1985), 4–7. For a list of works devoted to the topic of qing in literature, see Martin W. Huang, “Sentiments of Desire—Thoughts on the Cult of Qing in Ming-Qing Literature,” CLEAR, Vol. 20: 153–184 (1998), 153, notes 1–2. Huang’s own later volume Desire is foremost among works on the topic. Huang argues in “Sentiments of Desire” that ambiguities of the cult of qing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the consequence of a new attitude towards desire, and of its appropriation by disenfranchised literati trying to reassert their elite status by re-inventing themselves as custodians of a Confucian heritage. 81 Feng Menglong, Qingshi leilüe 情史類略 (Changsha: Yueli, 1983), Preface, 1. 80

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their moral effect on readers and in their possible political repercussions, become part of a generic discourse on qing. Like the role of the author, the status of ction and the position of women, qing is contested ground, capable of both elevating humanity and causing it wilfully to self-destruct. Qing is depicted in Ming and Qing works as a force which can overcome death itself. Numerous examples abound in Feng Menglong’s collections of stories of men succumbing to qing and either pining and wasting away out of love, or expending excess qing and dying of debilitating diseases. These tropes run through the Qing works too: in Qinglou meng we see the protagonist Jin Yixiang 金挹香 resurrected, after several days in his cofn, “on account of his surpassing qing.” In Fengyue meng, indulgence in qing is cited as the cause of destruction and/or death of several of the major male characters. Fidelity and sincerity may have constituted the essence of qing in Feng Menglong’s edited stories, but the theme of qing is continuously developed and broadened during the Qing, as the degradations of its excess begin to outweigh its romantic associations. The stories in Feng Menglong’s vernacular collections are more assured in their narration than the complex narrative modes of nineteenth-century works. The self-contained episodes of the Ming stories are tightly-woven, without extraneous characters, and allow for less ambiguity, moral or narrative, than the longer novels. Varying degrees of distance between narrator and implied author are created, encouraging the reader to question the narrator’s stance, but the overt narratorial asides and quips mostly coddle the reader into a sense of trust in their guide. The person of the omnipresent narrator undergoes gradual renement over the two century span separating these stories from the red-light novels, but the sources of the characteristic narratorial intrusions of the Qing vernacular novel may be traced to the Ming story. This ‘simulated context’ of a professional story-teller addressing a live audience82 is retained as a basic framework for many of the later redlight novels, where contradictions arise with the new emphasis on the written ctionality of texts. In classical stories the narratorial stance is that of chronicler or biographer, in vernacular that of storyteller:83 the courtesan novel may elide the two functions with an emphasis on

82 Patrick Hanan, “The Making of The Pearl-Sewn Shirt and the Courtesan’s Jewel Box,” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 33: 124–153 (1974), 135. 83 Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Short Story, 21.

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the written transmission of the physical text. The two great principles underlying the technique of Chinese vernacular ction, its simulated context and formal realism,84 are each challenged and developed in the vernacular novels of the nineteenth century. With a development of the narratorial persona the need for irrefutable authentication of the story is bypassed, and names, times and place references are correspondingly scaled down.85 By the Qing, means of obtaining the (pre-recorded) text are often contrived in the prologue, but this is no longer a promotion of historic authenticity, but a questioning of how ction was to be read. The narrator of the Ming story often acts as commentator on his own tale, pointing out the odd illogicality and addressing the reader directly, a stance seen in all but the very late Qing works. In Gujin No. 24, “Yang Siwen meets an old acquaintance in Yanshan,” discussed above, the narrator at one point interjects: “The storyteller has made a mistake!,” adopting the reader’s voice, before citing a written source to counter any suggestion of error in the tale.86 The narrator provides an occasional note of outrage at the turn of events: “The betrayers didn’t meet with retribution in accord with heavenly principles—where is the principle in this?” he apostrophizes, when all seems to be going well for the illicit newly-weds.87 In contrast, the superscript commentary in this tale (believed to emanate from Feng) points three times to the dreamlike quality of the story, alerting readers to the supernatural aspect, comments on the curiosity of a jealous ghost, and sardonically notes that monks and nuns all long for marriage. Elsewhere, the jibes are more explicit and might be shared between narrator and commentator: in “The Pearl-Sewn Shirt,” the extra-textual commentary avers: “Of those who predict fate by fortune telling, many are mistaken,” while a

84

Hanan, “The Making of the Pearl-Sewn Shirt,” 139. However, in some early works from around the 1850s, such as Fengyue meng, where the pleasure town of Yangzhou supersedes a customary Hangzhou story setting, a street and canal map could still be drawn up from references within the novel, such is the prevalence of topographical references. See Patrick Hanan, “Fengyue meng and the Courtesan Novel,” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 58: 349–355 (1998). A formal commitment to veracity was strongest in the earlier Tang stories, where witnesses might be called upon in the text to record a meeting with the protagonist of the tale, or where ctional characters were identied with historical contemporaries. See James R. Hightower, “Yuan Chen and ‘The Story of Ying-Ying,’ ” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 33: 91–123 (1974), 91. 86 Feng Menglong, Quan xiang gujin xiaoshuo, 24/5a. 87 Feng Menglong, Quan xiang gujin xiaoshuo, 24/11a. 85

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page or two later the narrator breaks off to address his reader directly: “Spectator—do you think there has ever been a procuress who was not greedy for money?”88 Poetry, which can be read in the voice of the narrator, opens each of the stories in Feng’s collections, and many of the same functions of poetry are retained throughout Qing ction. Poetry has structural and mood-enhancing purposes: in Tale No. 24, poetry provides descriptions of the festival scenery and of the appearance of Ms. Zheng; later in the narrative it provokes memories and induces sadness in Yang. Poetry written on walls provides a mechanism for Yang to recognise his old friend, Zheng’s husband, through his handwriting; poetry on a house wall conrms Ms Zheng’s location and existence (albeit, as it transpires, in spectral form) and provides a means of self-expression for her. The textual coincidences of poetry written on walls in temples or inns for passers-by, and the traces of emotions faintly but physically present, reappear in many vernacular novels in the nineteenth century. The question of how much Feng Menglong was citing extant verse and how much he himself created for the stories has been debated, as it has for red-light novels such as Fengyue meng or Huayue hen. Questions have been raised, too, over the folk origins of the verse, as well as the oral roots of the tales. Andrew Plaks reads the folk songs scattered through Feng’s stories as “literati exercises in the imitation of the popular song,” and others have referred to his “exible” handling of source material.89 One thing the debates should caution against, in either era, is making such rigid distinctions between cited and created, literati and folk poetry, since if critics cannot nd sources and cannot agree, there is a reasonable chance contemporary readers could not distinguish the two. The inuence that Feng’s anthologies of earlier stories have had on the idea of writing ction, and on the age-old Chinese conundrum of author as editor or creator is as relevant to later developments as the content or mechanics of the narrative. The gradual inversion of the privileging of editor over author was to preoccupy the red-light novelists two centuries later, in their quest for a new authorial authority. In the opening paragraph of Yang Shuhui’s study of Feng Menglong’s vernacular stories, he writes that he will examine Feng’s method of selecting materials, and show how he “creatively manipulated elements

88 89

Feng Menglong, Quan xiang gujin xiaoshuo, 1/4b, 6a. Andrew Plaks, Four Masterworks, 40; Yang, Appropriation and Representation, 41.

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of both popular and literati cultures to elevate this then-underrated literary genre.”90 The postface writer to a mid twentieth-century reproduction edition (complete with Ming-style buttery folded pages and superscript footnotes) states: “It seems as though no-one has ever taken note of Chinese short stories from the Song to the Ming,” pointing out that the text of Feng Menglong’s collection was lost entirely on the Mainland, with two Ming copies only available in Japanese collections.91 The project to raise the general appreciation of ction as a genre has been discussed above, but Feng’s own preface to the rst collection of stories, written in 1620, speaks of how every school of literature was buoyant under the Ming, and how works of vernacular ction alone were surpassing those of the Song.92 While this could be seen as part of the propaganda push, it also raises the question of whether we need see the drive to raise ction (and the author’s status, as a premier ction writer) as central to the project of writing. Intervening scholarship has played along with the notion of the worthlessness of ction. What is less clear is whether authors such as Feng Menglong were wanting to accord vernacular ction a status analogous to that of their other writings, or celebrate it as a popular genre with its own intellectual aspects. Feng Menglong wrote examination handbooks on the classics, edited classical tale anthologies and a local history, as well as composing vernacular ction and a joke book.93 It has become an accepted ction to promote the idea of ction as absent from the social record. One role into which the red-light authors slip easily is that of the marginalised scholar, where the vernacular is used to accentuate social exclusion. Yang Shuhui’s examination of Feng’s legacy under the rubrics of ‘marginality’ and ‘anxiety of service’ accords with this, analysing Feng’s sympathetic depiction of women in terms of his identication with them in their inferior roles vis-à-vis men, much as the overlooked scholar ventriloquised as woman throughout classical poetry.94 Vernacular ction was neither canonical nor prestigious as a form. But whether scholars and literary experts choose to acknowl-

90

Yang, Appropriation and Representation, 1. Feng Menglong, Quan xiang gujin xiaoshuo, Postface, 1a, 2a. 92 Feng Menglong, Quan xiang gujin xiaoshuo, Preface, 1a. 93 Feng Menglong, Stories Old and New, xvii–xviii. 94 See Yang, Appropriation and Representation, 100; on the marginalised history of the shi, see 116–122; on Feng Menglong’s biography and lack of examination success until awarded tribute student status aged around 60, see Yang, 116–122. Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story, 80–82. 91

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edge the fact in their non-ction personae or not, the traces of Feng’s techniques and ideologies in nineteenth-century works show that there was an ongoing vernacular tradition, that texts were available to later writers, and that the debates on the philosophy of vernacular writing were incorporated into later ction. Critics have noted that when Feng re-wrote the earlier stories for his anthologies, he increased the sense of oral storytelling, as if derived from oral transcripts, writing into the collection a simulated frame of live performance. This has been ascribed to a need to ‘borrow’ authority from traditional popular literature, or as a protest against the ‘ultraconservative archaist literary trend’ then dominant, an afrmation of Wang Yangming’s theories on spontaneity and the emotions, and also as an act of ‘duplicity’ by a literati author clearly producing editions for a literati audience.95 Increasing the narrative markers of the text as performance speaks also of an understanding of ction as important to community life and to collective memory. It does this both in its representation of the act of storytelling, and in that (ctional, literati) act of representation itself. While writers were still insisting in the late Qing that ction was an unworthy breed, and later writers on the Qing have used this as an explanatory factor in assessing motivation to write, there comes a point at which we have to ask: how much is this also part of a mythologizing discourse, and, certainly by the late Qing, an adopted guise, a gently parodic vein of thinking that Feng would have recognised? One self-conscious way of circumventing the (real or role-play) low status of vernacular author was to adopt the role of editor rather than writer. Feng Menglong blazes the way in this intellectualising trend. The twentieth-century categorising of red-light novel sets into genres, discussed above, or the building up of series of ‘human-sentiment novels,’ can be seen as a continued outworking of the privileging of the editorial over the creative function. The San yan history of re-working earlier materials and collecting folk songs was copied freely by the midnineteenth- century novelists, and in this they were aspiring to editorial credibility, even as authors. Inter-textual references, the appropriation of earlier songs and poems, and the creation of new poetry are seen particularly through until the 1880s, in works such as Fengyue meng, Qinglou meng and Huayue hen. Inasmuch as Feng Menglong “may represent

95

Yang, Appropriation and Representation, 19–32.

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the rst self-conscious literati effort to re-work folk stories and develop the vernacular story into a literary genre”96 the red-light novels are indebted to his collections. 1.5.2

Narrating the Perfect Woman: Caizi jiaren novellas

The themes and literary structures of late Ming and early Qing caizi jiaren (scholar-beauty) novellas bring us yet closer towards red-light ction in chronology and narrative evolution. From these works derive many of the elements in red-light ction related to gender transformations and male-female symmetries, and to robust, talented and upwardly mobile women. The afnities of red-light novels with the caizi jiaren stories point to factors often overlooked by critics: that red-light novels drew on mainstream vernacular reading traditions, and that their sources were not necessarily salacious; what is of interest is how red-light works disturb conventions. The caizi jiaren works encountered a critical silence similar to that occluding red-light novels, though for apparently more ‘objective’ aesthetic reasons, after the genre was dismissed for its lack of imagination.97 Three of the best known, Ping Shan Leng Yan 平山冷燕, Yu jiao li 玉嬌麗 and Haoqiu zhuan 好球傳, share many salient features of narrative in common, allowing certain generalisations on the formulaic nature of such works.98

96

Yang, Appropriation and Representation, 14. By Guo Changhe: see McMahon, Keith, “The Classic ‘Beauty-Scholar’ Romance and the Superiority of the Talented Woman,” in Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow, eds., Body, Subject and Power in China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 232. 98 Tian Hua Cang Zhuren 天花藏主人, Ping Shan Leng Yan; Yi Qiu Sanren 荑秋散人 Yu jiao li; Ming Jiao Zhong Ren 名教中人, Haoqiu zhuan. These were republished in the 1990s in the Shanghai Guji series “Ten Great Classical Social Human-sentiment novels.” Caizi jiaren works have been read as a distinct genre though often with cursory analysis of form. Justication for recognition as a group is given by recourse to precedent: early use by Liu Tongji, use of the collective term in the works themselves, in other novels such as Honglou meng, and in the later critical writings of Lu Xun, or more recently Lin Chen 林辰. Keith McMahon, for example, seems to dene genre as a function of temporal and formal phenomena: “As a group of like books, not simply stories with universal features, however, the caizi jiaren romances constitute a genre that attains a historical and cultural identity because of its appearance in twenty-chapter (or so) form about the early Qing.” Keith McMahon, “The Classic ‘Beauty-Scholar’ Romance,” 231. See also Lin Chen’s comprehensive study of the genre in the 1980s: Lin Chen, Mingmo Qingchu xiaoshuo shulu, 明末清初小說書錄 (Shenyang: Chunfeng, 1988). Again, the reason for creating parallels from these three works is their textual profusion, frequent reprintings, translation of form (e.g. Ping Shan Leng Yan became a chuanqi story, under the title Yu chi lou) and translation into foreign languages (Haoqiu zhuan was available in English, French and German in the eighteenth century, and in fteen foreign language editions by the twentieth century). 97

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The dissimilarities with the context of red-light stories would at rst seem to be overwhelming. Caizi jiaren narratives revolve around the outworking of a single plot thread, the marriage of the scholar and the beauty, or main female and male protagonists. A series of obstacles or tests, both physical and moral, are placed in the path of the young hero, while his desired or betrothed overcomes opposition from within the connes of the inner chambers. After proving their intellectual and spiritual worth, the couple are united in marriage, or (in the case of Haoqiu zhuan) a previous de jure marriage is consummated. Evil ofcials and relatives who have conspired against the predestined couple are punished, and the righteous poor who have aided them in their quest are honoured, often with high imperial accolades. The hero and heroine are moral and chivalric exemplars—in contradistinction to the negative examples set by the protagonists of the red-light novel—drawn in individuating detail.99 Themes which recur in caizi jiaren works include the fairy-talesque elevation of women, a celebration of father-daughter relations, the injurious wielding of power by some ofcials with its concomitant retribution, and discourses on the nature of talent (cai 才), committed affection (qing) and ritually correct behaviour (li 禮). The caizi jiaren stories propose a complex, if not contradictory, view of the female, and one to which nineteenth-century depictions of female courtesans can be seen as a reaction. This is not a picture of seventeenthcentury womanhood (maids, mothers and old servants still appear in their conventional and uncontroversial guises), but an exploration of mythical possibilities for the female child prodigy. Women display as much talent (cai ) as their suitors, but are also fully endowed with a beauty to rival Xi Shi. Talent and beauty are not qualities of the male and female partners respectively, but a shared basis for partnership. While the women of caizi jiaren stories derive from their self-sacricing chastity powers of self-determination and self-invention which exceed even that of their male counterparts,100 courtesans are (obviously) deprived of this means of self-expression. The caizi stories, together with Qing writers such as Li Yu, Yuan Mei and Ji Yun established new positions for women where virtue no longer resided in silence and illiteracy, and where foot-binding, widow chastity and concubinage could be challenged.101 99 See Richard C. Hessney, “Beyond Beauty and Talent: the Moral and Chivalric Self in The Fortunate Union,” in Hegel and Hessney, eds., Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 214. 100 McMahon, “The Classic ‘Beauty-Scholar’ Romance,” 228. 101 McMahon, “The Classic ‘Beauty-Scholar’ Romance,” 227.

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The exceptional girls and women of the caizi jiaren stories regard themselves as aspiring to be junzi 君子, adopting male role models as behavioural ideals. An ongoing search for men to equal their daughters lls the lives of the fathers or guardians in the novels. A close bond between father and daughter develops through mutual reliance and discussion, with the girls rising to such challenges as writing substitute poetry for their fathers or running the household in their absence. ( Just as parental absences in red-light ction open the way for a descent into dissipation, paternal, and especially maternal, absence is a key feature of many caizi plots, allowing the creative outing of rules of decorum). Bingxin, heroine of Haoqiu zhuan, is loved by her father “as jade” and is trusted with his affairs: “Ever since he had been an ofcial in the capital, he had treated Bingxin just as a son; all the affairs of the household were given to her to manage.”102 Enlightened early Qing fathers could hold in tension a desire for sons with an intellectual appreciation of daughters. As an only daughter, Bingxin is elevated to quasi-son status (in most of the novellas, it is the absence of male competition that turns a daughter into a superexemplary woman), but conventional laments for a lack of sons are still voiced by each of the girls’ fathers.103 Female friendships in the caizi stories, such as that between the two intellectual girls of Yu jiao li, display a competitive edge as keen as that of fraternal rivalry, but sometimes stray beyond friendship. “If my wise sister was a man, then I would be willing to hold his towel and comb [be a concubine] for the rest of my life”104 claims Ms Bai 白, initiating a discussion on whether anyone could prevent their same-sex marriage, and the perceived need for a gender change in either woman, given a lack of suitable male partners. (The proposed solution, taking a joint husband, is hardly an afrmation of either’s sexuality or intellectual independence). As Keith McMahon writes, “as a genre, these novels work towards a self-denition whereby they are about a man and a woman who are not really male and female;” the careful gender symmetry suggesting that “everyone can be of the same gender and can cross with the other

102

Ming Jiao Zhong Ren (pseud.), Haoqiu zhuan (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1995), 17. For example, Lord Bai in Yu jiao li dismisses his friends’ praise for her : “A widower in my declining years: to have a daughter, no matter how intelligent, is useless.” Yi Qiu San Ren (pseud.) Yu jiao li (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1994), 8; and Shan Xianren expresses his shame to the Emperor at having no sons (but a genius daughter), which meets with a laughing imperial dismissal, given the auspicious nature of her talents. Tian Hua Cang Zhuren (pseud.) Ping Shan Leng Yan (Shanghai, Shanghai guji, 1994), 6. 104 Yu jiao li, 121. 103

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gender. In one sense beauty and scholar are both men . . .”105 Bingxin’s lover responds to her fortitude in their situation with a telling comment: “this Bingxin is not a woman: to hear her speak, she really is a great hero [martial, male hero].”106 In Ping Shan Leng Yan we are treated to a poetic description of the ten-year-old heroine through the eyes of the emperor, which combines traditional attributes of feminine beauty (eyebrows like crescent moons, face like a ower bud, etc.) with her having “the air of a scholar-gentleman,”107 and throughout the novel it is clearly the girl’s cai, talent, that raises her to prominence. The cross-gender discourse on the transgressing of behavioural norms, which receives perhaps its fullest treatment in the 1849 red-light novel Pinhua baojian, comprises in the caizi jiaren stories disguise, physical similarity and intellectual equality.108 Women frequently disguise themselves to inveigle their way into male society (a heroic deed, when necessary), but men may also adopt disguises to cover their identity or take on a different role, continuing a long textual history of masquerade that surfaces only rarely in the late Qing. The gender transformations given form in the epicene characteristics of the young actors and nobles of Pinhua baojian are foreshadowed in the feminine appearance of caizi jiaren heroes and scholars. Female intellectual achievement, meanwhile, is more complex in the later works: some of the more romantic novels, like Qinglou meng, portray women who can just about hold their own in drinking game compositions, but in many red-light works the women display an even lower level of erudition than their partners; sharpness of mind is shown rather in an ability to unmask male duplicity. There are at least three striking differences from the women of redlight novels: the privileging of the female is reversed, the free-spirited, self-determining woman is bound, and the family ceases to be the normative source of values. In the supra-mundane economy of the caizi jiaren story, beauty and talent are precisely shared by both partners; in the debasement of the ideal in red-light works, males and females cannot always even live up to their respective, gendered attributes of beauty or intelligence. Although caizi jiaren protagonists might argue that, as superior 105

McMahon, “The Classic ‘Beauty-Scholar’ Romance,” 229, 241. Haoqiu zhuan, 44. 107 Ping Shan Leng Yan, 10. 108 On Pinhua baojian, see David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor; Keith McMahon, “Sublime Love and the Ethics of Equality in a Homoerotic Novel of the Nineteenth Century: Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses,” in Nan nü, Vol. 4.2: 70–109; and Starr, “Shifting Boundaries: Gender in Pinhua baojian,” Nan nü Vol. 1.2: 268–302. 106

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beings, they are not bound by the conventions of ritual behaviour, they are often ultra-orthodox in the implementation of the spirit of the law, as with Bingxin and her betrothed, adhering to a strict separation even when all believe their reputation to have been tainted. As in the Ming stories, those who play by social etiquette reap their socially-approved rewards. In contrast, the moralities of female courtesans have to be negotiated: there is no straightforward code of behaviour which allows characters, or the reader, to determine righteous actions in the world outside Confucian networks of relationships, and no such ready means of judging merit through a happy ending. The women of the caizi jiaren novellas are called upon to display resources of cunning and erudition that shame their male peers and superiors, and set up a high standard for later women to emulate, or in the case of turn-of-the-century red-light novels, to surpass in putting their wiles to nefarious uses. Bingxin in Haoqiu zhuan is subjected to repeated attempts to marry her against her will, including emotional blackmail and accusations of lack of lial piety, kidnap and murder plots. In one particularly heinous trap a would-be suitor, Guo, plots to kidnap her en route to her mother’s grave-sweeping, a plan foiled by the girl’s foresight in sending a sedan-chair lled with rocks to the ceremony. The heroes and heroines are not without a certain worldly deviousness, as when in a bold nesse Bingxin sells off her cousin to Guo in her place, having substituted the characters denoting the time of birth of her cousin on the betrothal documents and sending the bridal gifts sent to her uncle’s house, to foreclose any legal wranglings. The reader who condemns Bingxin for her callous action, the narrative suggests, is forced to ask: why is it acceptable for a nasty uncle to sell off a girl, but not a clever girl to do so? Extremes meet: Bingxin presents a case where parallels with courtesan women make sense. Striving to preserve her chastity and secure a rst-class husband, she is trapped between two suitors, one with pressing designs on her. The accommodations she makes with morality as means to her end are seen as grey areas by the authorities,109 and the poignancy of the narrative is derived from the sense that she and her lover are pitted against the rest of the (moral) world. Education is the key to emancipation for the scholar-beauty tale girls, who outwit their male relatives where they cannot prevail physically.

109 As the local magistrate ponders, the righteousness of her marriage ploy was “at this point difcult to determine.” Haoqiu zhuan, 62.

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Education is also their downfall, as successive girls create enemies when snide remarks in their poems are decoded by wiser men than the recipients. Running through the three works Ping Shan Leng Yan, Yu jiao li and Haoqiu zhuan is the assertion that women could excel at state examinations given the chance to compete, a topic which becomes more insistent in the (more romantic) later red-light works. The question of why bother educate daughters, who could not use their learning to become wise ofcials, was widely debated in the High Qing.110 The answer proposed by this sample of caizi jiaren works is not so much the practical one of teaching sons and rearing future generations, but one which afrms that girls may excel at learning for their own sake, and through it are enabled to enjoy quality time and debate with their fathers and equipped to ght any injustices that the corrupt ofcial world can throw at them. To study is also, of course, to secure a better spouse: as the hero of Yu jiao li argues: “if I do not take an exceptionally beautiful woman for my wife, then I, Su Youbai, will have read many poems and books in vain during my short time on earth, and my being a talented scholar (caizi ) will have been futile.”111 Questions of women, education and narrative intersect in the poetry of the caizi jiaren stories. Poetry begins and ends each chapter, and it is only in reading these stories, saturated with poetry, that an awareness of the absence of verse in some of the later red-light novels takes on its full force. Through poetry, women and noble youths display their erudition, search for soul-mates, mock the less-educated, and express their feelings. Poetry is intimately linked to the concepts of qing and cai. Through poetry the narrator comments on the nature of the characters and introduces wise or pithy common sayings to support his case. The plots of Ping Shan Leng Yan and Yu jiao li are centred on poetry: in the former an Imperial call for poetry on the theme of white swallows brings the heroine Shan Dai to court and sets in motion the sequence of events in the novella, and in the latter the search for a husband for the heroine is hampered by plagiarism and poetry theft. Poetry brings true lovers together, attracted by the sentiments of the verse, and by their own mutual abilities to transcend the written text and recognise each other as zhi ji, those who know each other. As in the Ming

110 See Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 76–78. 111 Yu jiao li, 36.

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stories, poetry penned by chance plays an important role in ‘coincidental’ meetings. In the paradise of caizi stories, true lovers can complete each other’s couplets and recognise in the other a skill to match their own. The logic of the caizi jiaren stories is simple: poetry is the ultimate test of talent and moral worth. Bad characters cannot compose poetry, a truism evident in the characterisation of red-light clients as well as courtesans. A close correlation which implicitly exists between physical and spiritual beauty allows those who falsely submit others’ works to be uncovered, disasters to be averted and the fake revealed. Poetry operates at both the level of story and discourse; at a structural level, commentary couplets following a zheng shi 正是 (‘this is shown by . . .’) are used to break up the text and introduce new themes; poetry provides background llers and link passages, as well as (narratorial) asides on themes such as fate. The couplets or quatrains that end each chapter provide an overview or summary through an impersonal, noncharacterised narratorial voice; this verse is often crude and the sentiments generalised, such as “Success and defeat lie with heaven, what good will human plotting do?”112 Verses introduced by a you fen jiao 有分教 (‘there was a destiny which caused . . .’) precede less obviously created verse, often with a more tangential relationship to the text. The poetic voice of the narrator is utilised to highlight and afrm coincidences in the plot. Through his exposure and naming of incredible twists the plausibility of events is (possibly) enhanced. The contrapuntal voice of the narrator-poet reassures readers that all is in control, despite vagaries in the plot: “if they are not duck and drake, they will not share a pillow,” the reader is reminded when things are looking doubtful for the lovers in Haoqiu zhuan.113 Verse which represents a character’s viewpoint might be introduced via a zhi jian 只見 (‘lo and behold’). Narratorially this verse represents the poetic skill of the character-focaliser, but this places the narrator in an awkward position, removing his veneer of authorial omnipotence and establishing him as a xed character, a second-rate poet. With few of the markers that characterise the more explicit narrator of a work such as Qinglou meng, this semi-revealed narrator problematises the voices of author and implied author. The narrator is predominantly aligned with the narratee, a position which is evident when characters

112 113

Yu jiao li, 18. Haoqiu zhuan, 78.

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verbalize their incomprehension at events. “Events on earth are truly difcult to predict,” sighs Shan Dai, echoed by her lover a line later114—but the narrator knows a fuller truth, and has imparted advance snippets to the reader earlier in the text. A related problem of narration not yet resolved in the caizi jiaren texts, which continues to trouble red-light authors through until the developments in the gure of the narrator at the turn of the twentieth century, is that of the recounting of events to characters within the novel. Internal narrative consistency, or allowing the reader to follow which character knows what, is gained at the cost of repetition, painfully so in Haoqiu zhuan. Each recapitulation of events to a third party is made in full and frequent verbatim sections. The revelation of unseen events also poses problems: a common solution is to present the musings of an eyewitness as a soliloquy, such as the monk recounting his part in the plot to poison the hero of Haoqiu zhuan, but the question of the addressee is left unresolved in this clumsy technique. In these seventeenth-century works, with an anthropomorphic eye/earwitness narrator, there is little description of interior thought, and the effect in the narrative is to create absurdly self-reective characters. Only rarely does the narrative voice gain a cognitive, characterised element, or address the reader directly: “What place would you say this garden is? In fact, it is. . . .,” making a point that an extremely obtuse reader may have missed.115 While the construction of the near-perfect women of caizi jiaren novellas offered much scope for creative renement to later authors, the narrative structures, at least in terms of the role of the narrator and the function of poetry, offered rather an exercise in overcoming limitation and challenge. 1.5.3

Textual Origins and Gendered Desire: Honglou meng

Although in the early part of Honglou meng statements are found denouncing the literary and moral merit of the caizi jiaren stories, there are those who argue cogently that these stories were a necessary prelude to the novel, and that Cao Xueqin drew on both the content and style of the

114

Ping Shan Leng Yan, 115. Ping Shan Leng Yan, 104. As Hessney notes, the use of techniques of drama to present or develop characters, with less reliance on extended narrative passages of psychological examination in the voice of the narrator, and more direct presentation through speech, are common to caizi works, “Beyond Beauty and Talent,” 249. 115

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romances in his acclaimed work.116 Cao’s criticism of the caizi tales does not negate his debt, which is seen in aspects of characterisation (such as the direct borrowing of a child born with jade in its mouth from Yu jiao li ), in the use of poems to express a character’s talents, and in his recycling of particular phrases and expressions found in caizi jiaren texts.117 While links can be made to red-light novels via this chain of referents, some aspects of the later novels can also be attributed directly to Cao’s novel. The heritage of Honglou meng, itself deeply indebted to earlier vernacular and dramatic discourses, is manifold. The status of the courtesan novel as ction is heavily dependent upon the new possibilities of ctive narration opened up by the avowedly non-historical beginnings of Honglou meng. Self-reexivity on the ctive nature of the text, and on its motifs and themes that characterise it, is the single most important legacy of Cao’s novel to narrative in the nineteenth century. Here, too, the discourse on ction is linked to the character of the narrator, usually a more conventional gure than the polymorphic Stone. Whereas Honglou meng presents a dateless and timeless text to establish its ctive nature, some of the red-light novels revert to the biographical format of a historical novel to highlight the different frames of reality. Similarity between Honglou meng and the red-light novels over the ctionality of the narratives has emerged in their respective treatments by critics. Both have seen ction read as history, and been subjected to protracted attempts to discover the referents thought to be hidden behind the text.118 But, as Anthony Yu makes clear throughout his study Rereading the Stone, the text makes compelling claims for its own ctionality, and queries any determination of historical truth. The means through which the author engages the reader “in an unprecedented and continuous discussion on the nature of ction itself and simultaneously on the nature of reading” can be summarised as: the alleged process of production of the text, its casual beginnings and different levels of illusion, debates among characters on the effect of reading the text, characterisation of the story as dream, fantasy and riddle, pointers to the materiality of the text, and a consistent drawing of attention to the language of the work.119 The means by 116 See e.g. Huang Lixin 黃立新 “Qingchu caizi jiaren xiaoshuo yu ‘Honglou meng’ ” 清初才子佳人小說與紅樓夢 Honglou meng yanjiu jikan 紅樓夢研究集刊, Volume 10 (1983), 280. 117 Huang Lixin, “Qingchu caizi jiaren,” 277. 118 On this aspect in Honglou meng, see e.g. Anthony Yu, Rereading the Stone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 19. 119 See Yu, Rereading the Stone, 47–48, 50, 210 et passim.

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which the courtesan novels assert their ctionality, and their reasons for doing so, are set against this heritage of Honglou meng. Certain metactional aspects of the courtesan novels, apparent in the awareness and manipulation of the structuring of the narrative, are derived directly from readings of Honglou meng. As Plaks writes of Cao’s work, “the nely ordered correspondences between mimesis and meaning in the novel make the impression nearly inescapable that the authors were aware of and in control of at least some of the patterns of structure.”120 This signposting or ‘planting’ of patterns which direct readers’ attention to an overall frame of reference takes effect through a series of mechanisms, including the use of a prologue to form a notion of the whole work; parallel couplets for chapter headings which juxtapose dual alternations; the structuring of relations between characters according to seasonal and elemental periodicity; and the manipulation of form and meaning in the allegorical Daguan garden.121 For Plaks, the structures the author is pointing to are ones of cosmology: complementary bipolarity (yin-yang) and multiple periodicity (wuxing 五行). While red-light ction equally foregrounds patterns of narrative, the nineteenth-century works point to their own act of writing, and the text itself as the site of meaning, rather than cosmological correlations. The disparities in some of the red-light works between a ‘supernatural’ frame and a more realistic story can readily be traced to Honglou meng, where “the framework appears to function as a disturbing negative commentary on an otherwise sympathetic treatment of romantic love.”122 The framing devices of Qing courtesan novels need to be read in an integrated manner with the central story-text, but have likewise been dismissed as having separate functions. Though the red-light novels make less use of myth and allegory, symbol and dreams are employed throughout earlier red-light works. These novels cannot follow Honglou meng in its complexity of overlapping levels of the mythic and the mimetic, but draw on 120 Andrew Plaks, Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 7. 121 See Plaks, Archetype and Allegory, 71–73, 6. 122 Lucien Miller, Masks of Fiction in Dream of the Red Chamber: myth, mimesis and persona (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1975), 13. A similar difference in viewpoints is evident between the condemnation of brothel-life in the frame of e.g. Fengyue meng and the central narrative. Miller nds explanations put forward for frames in other literatures insufcient to account for their use in Honglou meng, seeing neither moral, didactic nor erotic reasons for the disjunction, but rather the presentation of “a unied vision in which the supernatural and natural cohere in a work of mythic, rather than ‘realistic’, ction.” See Miller, Masks of Fiction, 11.

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its techniques for interweaving structure with meaning. Parallels and differences in the use of framing techniques in Honglou meng and some red-light works are evident. In Cao’s novel one of the multiple frames is that of the goddess Nuwa (Nugua), who leaves one solitary stone out of her heavenly building project: the Stone who is text, story and narrator in the novel. This creator-gure Nuwa exits from view, to reappear at the very end of the tale, resembling the author-gure of later works such as Fengyue meng or Huayue hen. The courtesan novelist is more likely to introduce himself, or an implied author, as the creator-gure: this substitution of self for the mythic deity is allied to the transference in signication from cosmology to the text.123 The uselessness of the rejected scholars, as with the Stone, is overcome through writing and the inscription of the story made public. It might not be too far-fetched to nd echoes of Nuwa’s function as a matchmaker carried over into the client-prostitute relationships set up early on in the red-light novels. The multiple beginnings of Honglou meng disorientate the reader and establish the themes of dream and reality, truth and falsity. Confusion over who exactly is narrating a novel, and dream-vision transcription, are prominent in the later novels, though used primarily to signal different levels of textual reception. The theme of waking from a dream becomes a frame for the process of retrospective, enlightened narration in the redlight novels. Except for the nal chapters of Qinglou meng or Huayue hen, the mythic-fantastic realm does not assume the signicance it enjoys in Honglou meng, and does not force the reader to confront the ctionality of the text to the same extent.124 The supernatural framework in the above two works appears to the reader more as an extraneous overlay, one which does little to question meaning embodied in the realistic level of the text. The imposition of the supernatural in the derivative courtesan works leaves the reader dissatised, undermining the realistic representation of the text without proposing a justication in terms of ctional reality. The play of meaning at various levels of signication between earthly, dream and supernatural worlds in Honglou meng is frequently imitated in later courtesan ction. While the mythic frame of Honglou meng encases the whole novel, the supernatural is frequently only invoked as a device of closure in red-light ction, with a deus ex machina character resolving plot

123

See Chapter Two below for a much fuller discussion of this. See Wai-yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 152. 124

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conict, or the protagonist being caught up to a heaven where he can be united with former and deceased lovers (in Pinhua baojian and Qinglou meng respectively). Allegorical references to the supernatural in red-light works in general fail to attain the layered depth of Honglou meng. At the point of interface between the present, concrete narrated world and another parallel universe, glimpsed sporadically, ctive reality is questioned. Throughout Pinhua baojian references are made to antecedent meetings or afnities, which are never fully explained. Incidental ambiguities create a trace of narrative unease regarding the status of narrated world, while the karmic origins of Baoyu and Lin Daiyu are alluded to much more directly in Cao Xueqin’s novel. While an overt ctional self-consciousness was the most important bequest of Honglou meng to the nineteenth-century courtesan novels, other narrative features also trace their line of descent through Cao’s novel. Narrative tropes adapted from Honglou meng include the enlivening of the material world by objects, such as mirrors, imbued with metaphoric signicance, as well as features of characterisation. The lack of interiority and character development which scholars have seen in Baoyu125 remains a feature of the narration of character through most of the nineteenthcentury texts. Characters are rarely self-reexive, thought is narrated in dramatic form as conversation, and there is often little progression towards a moral enlightenment. In word-play and rhetoric, riddle and song, the courtesan novels follow the trail of Honglou meng. The use of poetry to reveal the inner nature of a character, especially female characters, ourishes in red-light literature, where women may lament their lot in a borrowed voice, or in their own verse if literate. In taking as their theme the discourse of qing and the nature of desire, its moral repercussions and place in male-female relations, red-light novels play on the representation of love and desire in the Daguan garden, in an ironic but self-validating manner. Inasmuch as Honglou meng is subversive of orthodoxy in its privileging of qing, the later novels are even more so in their transposition of desire further beyond social sanctication. In several works the theme of qing is taken to its moral extreme: the idea that the greatest love that can be found is that between a man and a prostitute is debated at length by characters in Qinglou meng, and played out in the bonds and treacheries of the relationships in Fengyue meng, or in the spiritual union between boys and actors in Pinhua baojian. The male idealising belief that it is woman who

125

See e.g., Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment, 202.

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most embodies qing126 reaches its apogee in the incarnation of the literary prostitute. Such desires are legitimated by their being written about, by their encoding in the newly legitimated discourses of the vernacular novel as they simultaneously debase the genre for contemporary and future critics. Desire was excised from May Fourth discourse concurrently with the usurping of the zhanghui xiaoshuo by the short story: a prescriptive move that over-rode literary evolution. The desire-and-warning theme which is foregrounded in the framing of most red-light novels was toned down in later manuscripts of Honglou meng but strongly apparent in the 1754 MS.127 The Stone’s desire for worldly pleasures precipitated his incarnation on earth. Having ignored the advice of clerics, he is responsible for his own fate, much like the reader of the red-light novel who has read of the dangers yet persists in dallying with the brothel scene. Just as the didactic frame may be reinterpreted by the events of the novel, it takes the full length of the narrative for Baoyu to realise that love is an illusion, and the time-period of a brothel novel for the protagonist to forsake his lifestyle. In this much, all of the works are following the tradition of novels such as Li Yu’s Rou putuan (A carnal prayer mat), where the formal emphasis on the transformation and repentance of the protagonist scarcely detracts from his unconstrained and unexpurgated sexual conquests in the central chapters. Play on gender and analysis of the dialectics of gender within characters of red-light novels owe much to the character of Baoyu, and to the masculinised and feminised women in his life, Baochai and Daiyu. The “tumultuous merging of masculine and feminine which has made Baoyu so socially eccentric”128 is not so far from the norm in representations of the feminised and highly desirable protagonists of certain courtesan novels, developed to the fullest in the mid nineteenth-century work Pinhua baojian.129 Though the gendered nature of Confucian kinship construction

126

Yu, Rereading the Stone, 106. Yu, Rereading the Stone, 117. 128 Louise Edwards, “Gender Imperatives in Honglou Meng: Baoyu’s Bisexuality,” in CLEAR 1990 (12), 70. 129 This transgression of traditional gender roles, especially in the effeminate male, denoted by his slender beauty and gentle compassion, is where the prescribed gender roles of women are under discussion alongside a questioning of the identity of boy actors and their male lovers. Sexual difference exists as much within as between characters: Baoyu straddles the world of women in the garden and an outer, masculine society, unwilling to conne himself to either. The young men of Pinhua baojian are forced by the close of the novel to accede to the demands of society, and seem able to set aside their deep same-sex bonds of qing fairly lightly and adopt roles as husbands and lovers. See Starr, “Shifting Boundaries.” 127

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heavily inuences the reaction of his family to Baoyu, in most red-light novels relationships are precisely outside of kinship bonds and gender expression is relatively free. A similar use of hypermasculine characters as a foil to the relatively effeminate heroes can be seen in various texts, from Xue Pan 薛蟠 in Honglou meng to Xi Shiyi 奚十一 or Pan San 潘三 in Pinhua baojian, the juxtaposed presentation in both examples highlighting narrative signication. Base characters are usually aggressive, often brutal and lewd, and frequently can conceive of love or qing only in terms of sexual gratication. Though such a text may question or pastiche gender norms, like Honglou meng it will eventually reiterate support for a social status quo. Finally, the question of to what degree courtesan novels are autobiographical relates closely to the autobiographical project of Honglou meng, and to the concerns of Redology in promoting the matter. Though literati concern with the self is often identied as a Ming phenomenon, Honglou meng has been read recently in a thoroughly auto-dimension,130 with the female characters as displaced refractions of the author Cao Xueqin, or metaphors for his self. Regret for past life tinged with a nostalgia for youth permeate both discourses, but beyond this, it is speculative to read red-light novels as intensely autobiographical. There is certainly a self-othering under way, perceptible especially through the explicit self of the narrator, but unsubstantiated autobiographical readings of redlight novels are problematic. Searching for the historical referent of a text, either in the life of its author or his contemporaries, downplays the ctionality that both Honglou meng and the red-light novels assert. What we can admit is that the identity crisis of the literati so crucial in shaping autobiographical sensibility in novels of the eighteenth century131 evolves into a sometimes bemused, sometimes anxiety-ridden commentary on the marginalised scholar, who retains the right to dissociate himself from any such depiction. 1.6

The Textual Context

The range of literary sources and inuences for red-light works discussed in the previous three sections points towards the text-based social and

130 See Martin W. Huang, Literati and Self Re/Presentation: Autobiographical Sensibilities in the Eighteenth-Century Chinese Novel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), esp. 75–97. 131 Huang, Literati and Self Re/Presentation, 27.

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educational networks of their authors. Without access to manuscript or printed copies of earlier ction, there would be no literary inuence to trace. Late Qing authors consciously inhabited a super-textualised universe. Family genealogies recorded births and deaths, printed calendars and almanacs marked time, gazettes and newspapers spread information, religious tracts appeared regularly—to say nothing of the range of ofcial and scholarly texts the elite were expected to command and which formed the basis for social intercourse. Not only were educated males aware of the play of written material in their everyday lives, but they were better trained in both the gamut of literary form and in textual scholarship than any other generation previously or since. This training required a close knowledge of patterns of scholarship from Song Neo-Confucian writings backwards to the source texts of the classics, and forwards to the theories of the kaozheng 考證 (evidential scholarship) movement of the mid-Qing. Writers of red-light ction at the end of the nineteenth century were members of the last generation to sit examinations which so vigorously tested writing style and literary accomplishment alongside knowledge of the canonical texts. Their ction records the interplay between textual and literary heritage. Temperament, inclination, and the availability of time and writing materials might all dispose an individual to begin and conclude a literary project. The creation, distribution and meaning of any such writing reects a collective cultural heritage of textual production, as well as a literary past. Literary conventions in nineteenth-century red-light ction drew heavily on the novels and novellas discussed above, but also on a keen understanding of the material form of writing. While this chapter might seem to divert from its course here, that is precisely the point. The late Qing was an era of rapid transition in textual production, and study of literary form needs to take into account these changing textual forms. Mid nineteenth-century novels were made public in a variety of traditional and new forms, and the historic transition from manuscript to imprint (Song-Ming) is as relevant to literary editions as that from woodblock to moveable typeset (Ming-Qing), or typeset to lithograph (late Qing). The following sections of this chapter necessarily paint in broad brush strokes, but aim to give a sense of the cultural value assigned to written texts, in order to show how questions surrounding the material text are intertwined with those of narrative. For the purpose of this discussion, and to see how far the concept can usefully be pushed, the texts of ctional works are considered qua texts, not as a particular type of debased literature beyond the scholarly

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pale, but material objects, authored and circulated as any other text, and subject to much the same processes and pressures. As one western textual critic has written: “. . . the avenues between textual scholarship, literary theory, interpretation and pedagogy are now open to two- and three- and even four-way trafc . . .”132 Students of Chinese literature have been slow to traverse the corridors between the ofces of literary theorists and histoire du livre scholars. While textual studies has proved rich ground of late, relatively few works have sought to link research on aspects of book production to the literary or historical content of those texts. 1.6.1

Textual Meaning

Texts accrue symbolic power. Like the power of a ruler, this is invested by common consent and is subject to reappraisal. To understand the value and meaning of texts towards the end of the Qing dynasty, a glance backwards at the Chinese textual heritage that provoked so much debate in this period is needed. As the written promulgation of imperial edicts, the codication of the law, and the source of the philosophical and intellectual discourse by which the elite in the state lived and ofciated, texts were signicant objects in China. The Chinese state was a textual foundation. In Mark Lewis’ celebrated formulation, the empire itself was based on an imaginary realm created within texts, allowing it to survive each dynastic transition.133 In the economy of the text, the state retained the right to exercise a monopoly on textual production and meaning for a set of core texts: the canon. Books and literary critics were bound up with the history of the state, and of the estate of scholars, in ways that are unparalleled in the West. While bookish knowledge was not necessarily an impediment to rule in Europe, martial valour and land holdings brought more prestige than library volumes. Chinese rulers were invariably presented at their enthronements and in the dynastic histories as lovers of the classics.134 Imperial authority over texts swung between two extreme

132 Philip Cohen, ed., Text and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory and Interpretation (New York and London: Garland, 1997), xiii. 133 See Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (New York: SUNY, 1999). 134 Much as art and calligraphy were collected, princes and ofcials built up vast collections of texts, and were represented to later generations as ardent readers See Jean-Pierre Drège, Les Bibliothèques en Chine au temps des Manuscrits ( Jusqu’au X e Siècle)

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expressions: the banning, burning and censorship of certain works to maintain control and fearful obedience, as practised by the incendiary Qin Shi Huangdi in the third century BC, and the initiation of book collection and publishing projects, such as in the reign of the Kangxi emperor (1662–1722). Some emperors combined both: the Qianlong emperor in the eighteenth century is famous both for his Siku Quanshu (Four treasuries) grand compendia project, and for decreeing the eradication of thousands of books deemed unsuitable or dangerous for possession by the populus. Expectations of censorship had ramications for generations of writers, including particularly those authors of more risqué works. While the canon itself was no longer invested with regenerative force in society by the late Qing, an understanding of the power it had exerted remained. In controlling the selection of particular editions to form the syllabus of national learning, the state set guidelines for acceptable interpretation and opened out the examination eld to all who could compete intellectually under those terms. State service remained the goal of almost all intellectuals through to the Qing: examination success brought immense prestige to the individual and to his family, as well as a sense of fullment in public service. The notion of a class of educated elite, separated from the rest of society by dint of their shared textual heritage, so apparent in the identity and self-worth of late imperial writers (including those unsuccessful in examinations),135 was deeply encoded in dynastic China. One strand of textual mastery outside the canon had a lasting effect on scholars and scholarship: the writings of those who never attained ofce. This was a sphere of textuality within the political eld but outside the state.136 The power of writing to preserve the self in text beyond

(Paris: Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1991), 18; 147. This paragraph draws on examples given by Drège: see esp. pp. 15–17. 135 The best literary source for studying this phenomenon remains, of course, the satirical eighteenth-century novel Rulin waishi. See further Stephen Roddy, Literati Identity and its Fictional Representation in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 136 The ‘failed’ ofcial Confucius was soon joined by a gallery of early sages and writers, exiled, imprisoned or crippled. Sima Qian, Qu Yuan, Lü Buwei, and Han Fei all achieved greater fame through their writings than through ofce. Their presence in the textual and historical record gave ongoing impetus to writers who believed in the power of the text but for whom this brought no prestige, and their writings could posthumously be brought into the canon. See further Lewis, Writing and Authority, Chapter Two.

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the human lifespan spurred on writers of all religious persuasions. As discussed above, red-light novels have repeatedly been described as the work of ‘frustrated scholars,’ with the implication that they are of little literary worth, written by those whose real talents were aimed elsewhere. This attitude draws on long-held beliefs about the goal of learning being bearing ofce, and of the value of ction within the hierarchy of Chinese texts, but it also highlights the power ascribed to texts as a means of recording and perpetuating the individual. The links between writing, power and self-image recreated or mocked in Qing ction are deeply entwined in the state-sponsored system of education and textual production. 1.6.2

Scholars and Texts in a Post-kaozheng Era

The way texts and learning were perceived and received was being moulded by three particular factors in the Qing. The rst was the wide availability of printed texts, resulting from growth in the printing industry in the context of a strong national economy, improved book storage and library facilities, and a developing interest in cataloguing and bibliographical expertise. A second factor was the large increase in the numbers of scholars and academies, and in particular, of career scholars. The third was the rise of the so-called Han learning: a return to exegetical modes of philology that came to be known as kaozheng xue 考證學, evidential or empirical research.137 This movement grew in strength and scholarly inuence during the eighteenth century and continued to govern groups of scholars into the nineteenth. Sheer numbers of trained students in an era of relatively static growth in ofcial posts meant thousands seeking employment in schools, as private secretarial staff to ofcials, or as researchers on any of the many imperial scholarship projects. By the year 1800, only scholars holding the highest jinshi 進士 status could expect an ofcial post —and even these might wait years before receiving the honour.138 At the

137 The evidential scholarship movement has been documented most fully in English by Benjamin A. Elman in his From Philosophy to Philology (Cambridge, MA: Council of East Asian Studies, Harvard), 1984. Some of Elman’s notions of the text can be enhanced with reference to later western textual scholarship, but his study of the historic development of the evidential movement and its inuences provides a basis for our understanding of textual developments across two centuries. 138 See Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, 95, 130; Frederick Wakeman, The Fall of Imperial China (New York: Free Press, 1975), 20–24.

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1870 gujin examination in Hangzhou, one observer estimated that 11, 000 candidates entered the examination yard, of whom 112 obtained the degree, along with 18 honourable mentions.139 With such a slim chance of success, there were many potential authors in the system. The surfeit of trained scholars over government or teaching posts left more men free to engage in textual and literary studies or other traditional genteel pursuits. A range of other academic options had in some measure mitigated the urgency of securing an ofcial post, and records from the early nineteenth century show various scholars refusing ofce in order to further their research, or retiring as early as possible to continue writing. Patronage remained a strong, if insecure, source of income for scholars, with local ofcials and Directors of Education in each province gathering scholars to work on regional projects, catalogue libraries or edit texts for publication. A growing specialisation of academic endeavour can only have further side-lined the non-elite elite, those from whom red-light ction authors are largely drawn: lower degree holders who were educated, but not in specialist employment or prestigious research posts. Participation in the process of transmission and textual emendation was a mandatory exercise for the educated from the formative Song period onwards.140 Only in the Qing dynasty were textual emendations by individual students routinely considered to be potentially damaging, when consensus emerged on narrowing the range of textual play and on preserving multiple textual forms. Although the kaozheng movement had waned by the beginning of the nineteenth century, its methodology of close textual study and challenge to orthodox thinking imbued later textual understanding and practices. While the classics no longer inspired 139 Rev. G.E. Moule, “Notes on the Provincial Examination of Chekeang [Zhejiang] of 1870 With a Version of One of the Essays,” in North China Branch of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, New Series No VI (1869–70), 129–137. In this fascinating article Moule notes that the Lieutenant-Governor of the province, who was ex-ofcio chief examiner, ceded his duties to his deputy as he himself did not have the second degree. At the 1867 examination sitting three years earlier, the then examiner had been roughly handled by students in the compound and forced to sign a bond himself because the government travel subsidy for poor candidates had been embezzled. Moule describes the set texts and verses and reproduces in translation one of the prize-winning essays on the Analects from the sitting. 140 As Cherniack writes of the formative Song period, textual criticism “has not been regarded as a matter to be left to specialists alone, but an activity that all educated persons should pursue,” editors regarding “virtually all texts” as correctable. Cherniack, “Book Culture and Textual Transmission in Song China,” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 54: 5–126 (1994), 14, 13. As Cherniack and others have noted, transmission was the process by which the text was perfected.

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quite the same reverential awe among scholars, the texts themselves became paradoxically more precious to researchers, and the monetary value of manuscripts shot up. Scholarship from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries had become more focused on the text, and less on the broad philosophical enquiries that the same texts had promoted in earlier generations. Even those working determinedly within the parameters of canonical and examination knowledge could not fail to appreciate the studies of their contemporaries. Training in textual skills, and a close understanding of the text as a transmitted object, left clear traces in ction of the Qing. Many readers kept notation books, recording what they read and their response to the text, or any peculiarities of edition. Scholars saw copying borrowed books by hand not as a menial or mechanical task but as a true form of reading: a slow ingestion of meaning and simultaneous correcting and improving of any textual errors, or commenting on particular phrases or passages. Allowing friends, and friends of friends, access to one’s manuscript collection was “an expected courtesy, and a prerequisite for scholarly communication,”141 and squabbles over refusals often made their way into letters and notebooks. 1.6.3 Technological Advances The value set on texts by state and society did not mean that scholars always embraced enthusiastically new technologies for producing the printed word. Throughout the late imperial period a lack of comment on technical and nancial aspects of printing in scholars’ writings betrays an unease and disdain towards the mechanical reproduction of texts.142 It is only at the very end of the nineteenth century that new modes of printing were embraced as part of a necessary technological revolution by the more avant-garde.

141

Elman, 150. See Lucille Chia, “The Development of the Jianyang Book Trade, Song-Yuan,” in Late Imperial China, Vol. 17, No. 1 ( June 1996), 11, 14. As Chia notes, printing as a trade was a half-way house, neither wholly mercantile, nor a desirable occupation for a scholar. A degree of tension at peddling great truths was inevitable for trained scholars cum printer-distributors. Failed examinees awaiting further sittings, or second sons of would-be elite who could not afford to study might opt to join the family printing operation. Both Lucille Chia and Cynthia Brokaw detail families engaged in part-trade, part-study. See Cynthia J. Brokaw, “Commercial Publishing in Late Imperial China: The Zou and Ma family businesses of Sibao, Fujian,” Late Imperial China Vol. 17, No. 1 ( June 1996), 49–92, esp. 54–56. 142

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Printing threatened to erode the revered place of scholars in late imperial society, once texts became more widely and cheaply available. Some intellectuals professed a moral indignation: books were to be recited, memorized and esteemed, not bought cheaply and skimmed quickly. The fact that commercial editions of works tended to attract the most ire, with accusations of depressed quality through lax editing and rushed printing, shows that for most degree-holders, accurate texts and orthodox study were higher priorities than broadening learning. The form in which a text appears has an intimate relation to how it is read, how its authorship is perceived, and how widely it is circulated. The surprising longevity and breadth of print production of nineteenthcentury red-light novels is considered in Chapter Four below. Red-light ction has often highlighted its own means of transmission, of the physical text to the reader and the verbal text through the narrator. In these self-referential textual musings, the authors drew on millennia of interest in the forms and means by which writings reached new readers. For any text to survive several hundred years in its original form requires its owners to value it, be prepared to store it, restore it, and ensure that heirs or successors are aware of its worth. For a text to survive as a reading object requires scholars willing to make the effort to understand dated texts in an unfashionable form or language, or to offer the nancial outlay to reproduce the verbal text in a more modern and accessible form. For Chinese manuscript texts, what is surprising, argues Drège, is not so much their paucity as their relative abundance, the texts saved only by the vagaries of chance.143 The fragility of books as material artefacts lent itself to the notion of a separate textual existence to the physical imprint, a notion explored in the framing devices of red-light narratives.144 The discrepancy between creation and transmis-

143 He writes: “La survivre et la transmission des texts sont en effet souvent le résultat de conditions bien particulières qui ont permis aux livres d’échapper à la destruction.” Drège, Introduction, Les Bibliothèques en Chine, 7. Even in Britain, where the copyright law of 1710 required nine copies to be deposited in the national copyright libraries, registration of titles was not obligatory, and popular bestsellers tended to be registered but not scholarly books. Kornicki writes of the analogous situation in pre-modern Japan: “Books could only be the temporary guardians of texts, and their transience was emphasised by the doleful frequency of res and by the insect damage which affected even the most carefully preserved collections.” Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan, 77. 144 This notion of a ‘text’ separate from its textual form extended to other media: antiquarians from the Song dynasty onwards sought out not the three-dimensional stone, but rubbings from it; believing that as a stone text deteriorates “an older rubbing is always more ‘authentic’ than the real object.” See Wu Hung, “On Rubbings,” in Zeitlin and Liu, eds., Writing and Materiality, 34.

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sion in Confucius’ famous dictum 述而不作 shu er bu zuo (I transmit; I do not create) exercised minds of far greater writers than the brothel novelists, but their reworking of the topic of texts had new resonance in an era when abundant new forms of print were available to writers and their publishing descendants. The impact on literature of the mechanics of textual production deserves more study than it has so far received.145 The profound silence on economic and technical aspects of book production and the book trade which reverberates across the centuries is generally ascribed by modern writers to a genteel distaste for involvement in commerce.146 The course of the development of printing across the Qing was not one of uniform advance in terms of volume, technique or quality, but a tale of regional difference, patchy progress and varied output.147 The early Qing printing industry suffered retrenchment in part because of prohibitions and bans: the industry remained artisanal as a form of

145 The best starting-point for a study of book form has been for many years Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin’s Paper and Printing, Part I, Volume 5 of Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985); now cf. Joseph P. McDermott’s A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006). Among the various works on the history of printing, see particularly Dennis Twitchett, Printing and Publishing in Medieval China (London: The Wynkyn de Worde Society, 1983); Inoue Susumu 井上進, 中國出版文化史 (A history of Chinese publishing culture) (Nagoya: Nagoya University Press, 2002); Zhang Xiumin 張秀民, Yinshua shi lunwen ji 印刷史論文集 (Collected essays on the history of printing) (Beijing: Yinshua Gongye, 1988); Ji Shaofu 吉少甫, Zhongguo Chuban Jianshi 中國出版簡史 (A brief history of Chinese publishing) (Shanghai: Xuelin, 1991); on moveable type see Huozi yinshua yuanliu 活字印刷源流 (The origins of moveable type printing), in Volume 2 of Zhongguo yinshua shiliao xuanji 中國印刷史料選輯 (Selected materials on the history of printing) (Beijing: Yinshua Gongye Chuban, 1990); see also the articles in Late Imperial China, Vol. 17, No. 1 ( June 1996), Special Issue: Publishing and the Print Culture in Late Imperial China. 146 Perhaps resulting from this legacy, even now there is no equivalent of the English Short Title Catalogue, with its millions of entries giving nearly complete lists of extant titles for any pre-nineteenth-century bookseller. It is clear that publishing by late imperial booksellers, as opposed to private or state printing, was economically driven by popular sales, with practical books such as medical volumes, writing textbooks or primers topping the charts. See Marie-Pierre Müller, “Problèmes de l’étude du commerce du livre,” in Drège, Le Livre et L’Imprimerie, 90. 147 Books of the early Qing largely resembled those of the late Ming, though by the nineteenth century the craft style of character prevailed, with many more rows of characters lined up on the page. Printing was a society phenomenon: numerous examples are recorded of Qing scholars and gentry borrowing, buying, or having carved fonts in both wood and copper in order to display their lial piety by bringing glory to their parents with a typeset edition of an ancestor’s work. Sets of typeface had become a commodity, lent, sold and given as gifts. The Qing saw continued experimentation in print techniques, with evidence for regular printing with clay characters. For details of examples, see Zhang Xiumin, Yinshua shi lunwen ji, 215, 204, 220, 254–6.

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insurance against high losses from undertaking printing projects subsequently outlawed under interventionist policies.148 In the mid-nineteenth century, printing was both disrupted and boosted by the Taiping army uprising. In the period after 1844 (the era in which Pinhua baojian was printed, and Fengyue Meng and Huayue hen were circulating) the Taiping produced large numbers of tracts with artisan workers from Guangxi and Hubei, later setting up full printing faculties in Tianjing (Nanjing). The relative number of quality book sets uctuated, falling during Daoguang (around 1820s-40s) until after the Taiping wars ended.149 Following the destruction the Taiping armies created in their wake, disrupting whole districts and marketing routes, the Qing government was forced to publicise a restoration of literary education, setting up ofcial publications bureaux ( guanshu ju 官書局) in provinces across the south, printing imperially-sanctioned editions or works from the four categories (classics, histories, philosophies or belles-lettres).150 While statistics vary, it is uniformly accepted that there was a surge in print production towards the turn of the twentieth century. Some of the major staging posts in production volume include the hand-operated rolling press rst used by the Shanghai Shenbao newspaper in 1872, with a capacity of several hundred sheets an hour; the 1898 imports of Japanese model rolling presses; and the 1906 British motor-driven single rolling cylinder press with its capacity of a thousand sheets an hour.151 Many of the technological advances that fuelled the expansion were developed within the newsprint industry—and many of the new novels of the period were serialised within these same print journals. Shanghai formed the epicentre of the new print industry, with lithographic printing spreading from the mission presses to become the vogue in the decades following the 1870s.152 By the 1890s more than

148

Ji Shaofu, Zhongguo chuban jianshi, 167. Ji Shaofu, Zhongguo chuban jianshi, 175–6. 150 A corresponding decline in family printing businesses has been shown in the mid-nineteenth century, when mechanised western printing techniques were introduced into Guangzhou and Shanghai. See Brokow’s study of Sibao family printers, “Commercial Publishing,” 58. 151 See e.g. Ji Shaofu, Zhongguo chuban jianshi, 262–4. 152 See Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butteries (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), 81. Examples in this paragraph are all taken from Link’s chapter on “The Rise of the Fiction Press,” which charts the growth of modern printing in Shanghai in ction and newspaper printing, from revolutionary newspapers through to women’s supplements and newspaper ction columns. Cf. Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China, 135. 149

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a hundred publishers were operating from the city, up tenfold from the 1860s, with several thousand titles in circulation.153 The speed of transcribing ready for print, and the elegance of the calligraphic style possible made lithographic reproduction popular, especially for pictorials, although new editions of the classics and examination preparation materials were also printed from stone slabs. Higher quality pictorial reproduction was made possible by such techniques as copper and zinc photogravure (similar to modern etching plates) and gelatine collotype. The surging production and circulation of illustrated ction periodicals testify to a growing market in the late Qing for quality disposable print. Rapid increases in the number of printing outlets at the turn of the century saw a parallel decline of presses unable to compete, the difculties for presses compounded by newly instituted writers’ fees and a sale or return policy at the bookshop end of the market.154 As various commentators have noted, and as discussed below in Chapter Four, readers of serialised ction lost out when printers went under. Han Bangqing’s acclaimed red-light novel Haishang hua liezhuan had not completed its serial run from 1892 in Haishang qishu before publication in book format in 1894. Writers of the calibre of Li Boyuan and Liang Qichao also began works in serial format which were never completed. Other works were printed in instalments by different publishers, with yet another press producing the rst monograph volume.155 The new presses led to new types of texts being bought and sold. New reference works, and dictionaries for examination preparation and for trade purposes were outperformed by ‘leisure reading’ materials: novels, tanci (prosimetric narratives, often simple to read), congshu (including vernacular ction) and pictorials, travelogues and newspapers.156 By the

153 See Alexander Des Forges, “Street Talk and Alley Stories.” As Des Forges notes, the printing industry accounted for 10% of all foreign investment in Shanghai at this point. 154 See Link, Mandarin Ducks, 84–85. 155 Wu Woyao’s well-known Ershi nian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang (Strange events seen in the past twenty years) was written between 1903 and 1910, and published in instalments by different publishers. See Dolehelová-Velingerová, “Typology of Plot Structures in late Qing Novels,” in Dolehelová-Velingerová, ed., The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century, 42 note 26. Li Boyuan’s Haitian hong xue ji 海天鴻雪記 remained unnished: see Liu Ts’un-yan, Chinese Middlebrow Fiction, 18. 156 Des Forges, “Street Talk and Alley Stories,” 31–32. During the 1880s and 1890s both reprints of well-known novels and new editions from manuscript rolled off the presses: eight editions of Honglou meng alone appeared in Shanghai in a twenty-year

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1890s, ction supplements to newspapers were widespread, and literary journals began to gather a regular subscription readership. In an era when news was no longer state proclamation, and ction began to be carried in newspapers, and when editorial texts and illustrations were designed around each other, it is little wonder that the form of ction and its narrative content should continue to preoccupy authors. With ction now a cheap, instant medium, texts were no longer revered as the product of great personal time and investment. 1.7

Adverts and Bans

While late imperial book publishers sought new trade routes and innovative sales pitches, regulation of the book market took place further back along the supply chain. Since there is little point in banning works which are not widely available, prohibitions and book burnings testify to good circulation of texts in the Qing. Literary histories devote pages to the concept of bihuo 筆禍, bringing disaster on oneself through writing, and the fear of retribution remained strong even in the nineteenth century.157 The link between state and text was reinforced in state monopolies on certain categories of publishing and on export bans in the interests of national security. Early forms of copyright protection had fallen into abeyance during the Ming, when the rule of inspecting texts prior to publication lapsed, and a downside to this was the possibility of all works being regarded as suspect until proven otherwise. Notions of authorship in the Qing are considered in Chapter Two below, but the complex role of censorship in guiding and guarding authorship should not be underestimated. Modern Chinese commentators have listed various categories of banned books in the Ming and Qing, noting that even popular novels

period: see David L. Rolston, How to Read the Chinese Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 320. Des Forges lists (p. 33) some of the novels rst published in this period, including such favourites as Yesou puyan 野叟曝言, a newly edited Qixia Wuyi 七俠五義 (Seven knights and ve righteous men), Shen Fu’s Fusheng liu ji 浮生六紀 (Six records of a oating life) as well as Fengyue meng and Qinglou meng. Examples and statistics in the remainder of this paragraph are taken from Des Forges, “Street Talk”, Chapter 1; cf. Roswell Britton, The Chinese Periodical Press 1800–1912 (Shanghai, 1931). 157 Cf. Ma, Ta-loi, “Novels Prohibited in the Literary Inquisition of Emperor Ch’ienlung, 1722–1788,” in W. L. Y. Wang and Curtis P. Adkins, eds., Critical Essays in Chinese Fiction (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1980), 202. For a selected list of such incidents from the western Han through to the early Qing, see Wang Bin 王彬, Qingdai jinshu zongshu 清代禁書總述 (Beijing: Zhongguo Shudian, 1999), 6–10.

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like Shuihu zhuan had at times come under the label hui yin 諱淫, offending public morality. The main form of prohibition was book-banning by imperial decree, with the rst of the dynasty in 1652, and continuing ad hoc throughout the entire Qing. Some works were prohibited for political or societal reasons; others for considerations of moral purity, often related to the status of the author rather than the work itself; and lastly came works which can genuinely be appreciated as lewd or erotic, such as Jin Ping Mei, or Li Yu’s Rou putuan.158 The latter formed a small minority of suppressed titles, with the great majority being deemed politically sensitive. The tendency of modern Mainland critics to tie prohibitions in so tightly to problems of ‘feudal society’ is itself a gentle echo of former eras: in order to justify the release of once banned works of potentially sensitive morality, the greater association of feudal evil is used to ward off contemporary prurience.159 Relatively few works were banned in the Ming and early Qing, but a great number of works later prohibited were related to works set in this transition period. Only four prohibitions were issued on novels in the Ming, whereas twenty-two edicts listing banned works were promulgated during the Qing. Works that rulers such as Emperor Wen had had translated to improve literacy, such as the Four Books and even plays and novels, were later proscribed.160 Bans on translating historical ction were followed by prohibitions on lewd works during the 1700s and 1720s, on Shuihu zhuan and Xi xiang ji in the middle of the century, and during the early nineteenth century edicts were issued prohibiting the opening of stores to sell novels, and ordering the burning of works of romantic and historical ction.161 As late as 1868 a ban on chuanqi tales (of the supernatural) was issued, and in 1885 the literate were reminded that there would be no leniency for those caught carving

158 See e.g. Zhou Zhenfu, foreword to Zhongguo gudai jinhui xiaoshuo wenku 中國古 代禁毀小說文庫 (Xi’an: Taibai, 1998), 1–2. A useful volume providing detailed plot descriptions and comments on novels banned in the Ming and Qing is Li Shiren 李時人,Wei Chongxin 魏崇新 et al., eds., Zhongguo gudai jinhui xiaoshuo manhua 中國古 代禁毀小說漫話 (Shanghai: Hanyu da cidian chuban, 1999). 159 Some critics are more forthright: Wang Bin contends that under the shadow of banned books all progressive thought and all life was suppressed, and that the bans played an important factor in China’s lagging behind the West at the end of the Qing; see Qingdai jinshu zongshu. 160 Wang Bin, Qingdai jinshu zongshu, 21. As Goodrich notes, the prohibition under Qianlong on translating certain novels and dramas into Manchu brought about two negative effects: encouraging Manchus to learn to read in the original, and stiing a parallel written literature in Manchu. Goodrich, The Literary Inquisition, 8. 161 Wang Bin, Qingdai jinshu zongshu, 26.

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woodblocks for lewd novels. Performances of drama, one of the main leisure activities for red-light novel characters, were restricted as to time of day, location, and who could be represented on stage (certainly no emperors, consorts, sages or martyrs). Throughout the nineteenth century, a series of edicts prohibited, sometimes repeatedly, plays at night, Buddhist plays and female temple audiences, Manchu troops from performing on stage, ofcials from watching plays, and eunuchs from listening to them.162 These restrictions added to the outright bans on various play-texts that Qianlong had ordered. In terms of transporting prohibited books in the Qing, trafcking carried heavier penalties than possession. What modern readers might regard as draconian policies were set out in the Qing penal code: any bookseller caught selling lewd ction was to be handed over to his local ofcials and the edition destroyed. Suppliers could receive a three thousand li exile as well as a ogging; a bookseller one hundred strokes of the rod and three years of penal servitude/banishment (tu 徒), and the buyer one hundred strokes of the rod.163 Censorship in the Qing singled out romantic ction as well as more obviously erotic works. The framing devices that courtesan novelists used to promote their works as negative didactic examples fall into a revivied category of veiled writing in order to bypass censorship. Although the practice of proclaiming in the the preface that a work guided its readers by counter-example had become so conventionalised as to be read as a generic marker, its origins as self-defence against censorship present a key to understanding later red-light ction. 1.8

Rights to the Text: Authors and Authority

A new form of wording began to appear in the front of western texts a few years ago: the assertion by the author of his or her moral rights. It is not always clear to what this refers (in the UK the 1988 Copyrights, Design and Patents Act), but the implication is: the right to be recognised as the author and originator of the work and to enjoy the legal rights over the text that this entails. We have become used in the West

162 Wang Bin, Qingdai jinshu zongshu, 27–28. An 1803 ban on ofcials going to the theatre in everyday clothing and on Bannermen watching plays suggests that both type of violation were frequent. 163 Ji Shaofu, Zhongguo chuban jianshi, 167.

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over the last century to authorial copyright, but the situation is often more complex than it appears. Different editions may have different publishers and different holders of copyright.164 While authors may retain copyright over the written text, the press usually retains copyright over the context: cover design, text boxes, and any area that has required additional input. In considering authors and publishers’ rights over texts in Qing China, two ingrained beliefs noted above are salient. Texts in the common memory were born of political frustration and worldly failure, and, secondly, they existed to be transmitted and re-worked, and therefore belonged to the whole scholarly community. The ‘author’ of the Confucian text was a secretary, writing down the speech of the master. Authority and authorship were separate.165 Since the relationship between author and early text was that of an incomplete transcription, of an imputed, or even implied, voice, the reading strategies that developed and inuenced later reception were necessarily those of reading into and between the lines of text. The commentarial reading traditions of ‘reading alongside’ in later dynasties can be seen to have developed out of a pattern of text and explanation. The earliest texts were already presented as an interpretation of an oral delivery; any further interpretation to reach authorial meaning was naturally seen as guidance rather than grafti.166 This interlinking of authorship and editorship is a crucial feature in Chinese textual history. It relates to the reading process itself, to notions of scholarship and of education. As late as the nineteenth century, the names

164

In some instances and for some presses, the author retains copyright, in others the press holds copyright, but for several university presses, it is the Board of Trustees (e.g. Stanford University Press) or even the President and Fellows (Harvard) to whom legal copyright belongs. For example, D.C. Greetham retains copyright of Theories of the Text (OUP) and Glen Dudbridge of Lost Books in Medieval China (The British Library), but Brill and the University of Hawai’i Press that of the two editions of Kornicki’s The Book in Japan, and the President and Fellows of Harvard College that of Zeitlin and Liu’s Writing and Materiality in China. 165 See Lewis, Writing and Authority, 55–58. 166 The material form of early texts further promoted textual intervention: bamboo strip texts, bound with cords, could easily come apart or rot. As Lewis comments, “Writings transmitted in such media have a uidity and openness that sharply contrasts with the xity and clear limits to which we have grown accustomed.” Texts could be rearranged or reconstituted at will, or by accident. Texts were adaptive, and the communities that adapted them in a given way became dened by this action, with the role of the reader or transmitter secondary to that of author. See Lewis, Writing and Authority, 54–55.

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of punctuator and commentator might appear on a ctional work, but not that of the author, showing the relative valorisation of roles, and the particular problems with authoring works not recognised within the education system. Editing must be seen, especially in such cases where signicant re-writing was involved, as co-equal with authorship. This view oscillated, since Qing critics could both prefer heavily edited commentary editions of Ming novels and call for textual preservation. Even where ction was afforded greater status, it is arguably the textual integrity rather than authorial intention that spurred critics into denouncing those who adapted freely. As will be seen, dense inter-textuality in Qing novels is commensurate with a weak, communal notion of authorship, but becomes problematic when faced with reading and modern editing habits which foreground the author. All late imperial readers were trained in textual emendation, and in standard commentary practices, including the use of different ink colours and annotation markers. Unlike our modern notion of copyediting as a skilled profession for a minority, this was an integral function of scholarship. Students were scholars; trained to read and to teach. Texts in this sense belonged to the community, and the community was formed of all those who had the ability to contribute to those texts. Editorship improved or altered single copies of texts, which might then be passed on to individual readers or made available for print reproduction. The bearing of textual transmission on the question of authorship is critical. As Cherniack has noted, the view of many contemporary western textual theorists that texts are evolving entities, formed through collaborative processes, complements Chinese textual practice.167 Such a “faith in transmission as the process through which texts become perfected” reveals the concept of authorship as a gradual input, a moulding and melding by coessential minds.168 The heritage of anthologists such as Feng Menglong or Pu Songling, and editors of ction such as Jin Shengtan or Mao Zonggang can readily be seen. Problems arose in the Qing, where scholars divested themselves of

167

Cherniack, “Book Culture,” 9–10. Working on seventeenth-century England, Love terms this ‘serial composition,’ aligned to a ‘gradualistic’ notion of creativity, where there is no nal intention and versions do not replace but augment each other. Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts, 52. Love describes a lifestyle where “the activity of altering a text was more important than its outcome,” a state no doubt imaginable to many Confucian scholars (p. 53). 168

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the notion that all readers could, and should, alter or improve texts as acts of scholarship, but still valorised philology and the tracing of unsanctioned changes.169 A further tension between Qing and twentieth-century views of authorship is noted in Chapter Four below when modern editions of Qing works are considered. The lack of a perceived need to reproduce a text close to the author’s copy perpetuates the sense of a text reconstituted in each edition, but is paradoxically balanced by a desire to reproduce texts identical to earlier editions. As Widmer notes wryly in her study of Shuihu houzhuan, “no twentieth-century edition is an exact reection of the Hou-chuan as Ch’en Ch’en wrote it or as Ts’ai Ao revised it.”170 Since some modern editions provide exact reproductions of earlier editions of the work, with all transmissional mistakes faithfully reproduced, an over-compensation is evident in the professed desire for delity. Here it is textual integrity that is valorised, not authorial fair copy; the textual tradition subsumes authorial intention into its own overarching authority. The notion of authorship is inevitably formed in tandem with the means of production and transmission. If texts were seen as permeable to change and reinterpretation, then ownership of an edition signalled the right to reproduce it. Intellectual capital was neither copyright nor valuable in Qing China. The early development of block-printing in China has been linked to seal printing —stamping an inked seal onto paper as a sign of authentication.171 The act of reproducing a text by block-printing authenticated it, assuming the printer was authorised so to do. Ownership of the means to reproduce the text indicated from early times a signifying possession of the text, rather than this function being lodged with some creative, and possibly unknown, authorship.

169 Canonised texts were all along subject to much more regulated processes of emendation, with the aim being to stabilise authoritative versions, although the spread of the printed text challenged even the position of the classics. See Cherniack, “Book Culture,” 20–21. Attacks on the credibility of editions during the Song forced a divergence between imperial authority and textual authority. When the government relinquished its sole right to reprint classics, it also laid down its moral authority; texts were now open to scholarly revision. While private editions could allow multiple readings and doubtful passages, imperial texts continued to present a single legitimate reading. 170 Widmer, Margins, 217. 171 Carter, T.F., The Invention of Printing in China and its Spread Westwards (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), 9. “The idea of authentication,” writes Carter, “—a survival from association with the seal—was never quite lost in Chinese printing.”

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The history of translation of texts into Chinese during the nineteenth century shores up this proposition: there is no evidence of payment for translation rights being made by the bureaux to western or Asian authors, and translators such as the pre-eminent Lin Yutang made free use of the texts in aesthetic interpretation.172 In nineteenth-century Japan, too, translations appeared under the name of translator not author, again not plagiarism but evidence of a “loose sense of authorship” in a society where claims to authorship did not equate to claims for intellectual origination but “simply a claim to be the compiler of a text published as a book.”173 Since copyright was effectively held by the printer, who paid for the blocks to be cut and took any prot from the edition, writers stood to gain little in immediate material terms from print publication, or from attaching their name to a work which brought little scholarly cachet, such as ction. The authorship of base ction, even several renowned late imperial novels, for example Jin Ping Mei, Shuihu zhuan, and even some chapters of Honglou meng, is still contested. The inheritance of Zhu Xi coursed through late imperial veins. For the neo-Confucianist philosopher, the authentic texts of the classics existed in the mind and through oral transmission: the written texts were merely derivative transcripts. Since the goal of reading was to internalise and enact these texts, the physical writing was of little import.174 Texts were to train the mind and will; ction, seen as transient entertainment, was scarcely worth imprinting on the mind and its texts merited even less attention. The history of constructing and construing texts in China allows us to appreciate more fully the derivative nature of late imperial ction. Textual traditions promoted group learning and textual re-working,

172 A similar situation pertained in western Europe: Britain signed a copyright agreement with France in 1852 to prevent free (monetarily and in terms of textual integrity) translations; see e.g. Inga-Stina Eubank, “Reading the Brontës abroad: A Study in the Transmission of Victorian Novels in Continental Europe,” in Bell et al., eds., Re-constructing the Book. Negotiations across Europe resulted in the Berne convention of 1886 and its revision in 1909; for a brief history of authorship and copyright in Britain see e.g. Joseph F. Loewenstein, “Authentic Reproductions: The Material Origins of the New Bibliography,” in Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger, eds., Textual Formations and Reformations (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1998). The rapid increase in the number of translated works available in China over the course of the late Qing can be seen as a further aspect of heightened textual awareness. 173 Kornicki, The Book in Japan, 226–7. 174 Cf. Cherniack, “Book Culture,” 54–56.

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but also rearrangement within a text, which further diminished any sense of the need to recover an authorially sanctioned text. The course of textual change underlines nineteenth-century attitudes to narrative cohesion. The textual and the narrative are interlinked: the history of textual change feeds into ongoing narrative change. At least two of the six red-light texts studied in this volume have been described as sequels to Honglou meng; since that text itself, like Shuihu zhuan, was sequelled within its second edition by the addition of extra chapters, it is unsurprising that scholars should have continued this practice. A third work, Huayue hen, underwent a textual hiatus, with the author himself returning to the work after a decade and creating several more chapters and an expanded storyline. These loose sequel novels can be seen as an expansion of centuries of textual emendation. Many of the red-light texts under consideration are hybrid texts by nature, and the amalgamation of various forms of writing (epistolatory, verse, dramatic) into a single text indicates an eclectic approach to writing among authors. As the authors incorporated a wide selection of writing styles and text snippets into their ction, their own texts were in turn sampled and re-worked. This is played out in the abridgement and sequelling of texts, but also in the physical layout of transposed texts: collected together in congshu 叢書 repositories, or spliced up among pictorial and unrelated texts three to a page in compendia. A tradition of composite textual works, multiple authorship and authoritative amateur editing allowed the ready use and re-use of others’ texts—and, too, of others’ plot lines. Where there is a weak notion of authorship, plagiarism is no more than creativity. Since the author was unlikely to receive pecuniary gain from a novel text, the right to benet from a work held by the printer was naturally not constrained or contravened by a second take at a work. Any author who wanted wide readership had to come to an arrangement with a printer; conversely, a commercial printer looking for trade had to acquire a manuscript, or copy of a manuscript or printed work, to prepare for production. Relatively little is known, even for the Qing period, about transactions between authors and publishers. In Chinese ction texts of the nineteenth century, wherever the name or pseudonym of an author appeared, the text also carried the name of punctuator or editor, and commentator if present. Most Qing printed texts had title pages of three columns, with the title in the centre, the engraver in the right-hand column, and the name of engraver or holder of the printing blocks on the left-hand column, with the place of engraving,

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printer’s trademark and year of printing on the reverse page.175 The developing notion of a single author had not overridden centuries of group production of texts. The great numbers of prefaces and colophons attached to ction texts produced before the very end of the century attest to a continued frame of reference where the text is enhanced by collective effort and comment. Whereas modern Chinese criticism has read directly into the red-light texts either the biography of the author or detailed critiques of his life, the form of the text militates against this notion of a single unifying imputed author. All of the mid- to late nineteenth-century works studied here, including Pinhua baojian, Qinglou meng, Huayue hen and Fengyue meng, appeared under a pseudonym. The name of the author would be known to many, but far from all readers. The textual expertise and supposed societal belonging that writing brought gave no material or status gain to the red-light novelists; their authorship has for this reason been seen as an outpouring of frustration, and linked to the power of writing to outlast the moment of inscription and for texts and authors thereby to survive death. As the following chapters demonstrate, this is only one means of reading the text.

175

Ji Shaofu, Zhongguo chuban jianshi, 176.

CHAPTER TWO

THE NARRATOR FRAMED The old superstition about ction being ‘wicked’ has doubtless died out in England; but the spirit of it lingers in a certain oblique regard directed toward any story which does not more or less admit that it is only a joke. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” 1884.

“At the beginning of the twentieth century,” writes Henry Zhao, the narratological conventionality of Chinese vernacular ction nally entered a crisis, when the narrator’s position in the conventional narrative frame became problematic. In the majority of late Qing ction works, however, the traditional narrative frame fails to take on any substantial change. The earliest restlessness of a narratological transformation can be found in a very small number of the best of late Qing novels. Nevertheless, we cannot fail to notice, in almost all the novels of the period, a number of modications, the most apparent of which is the change of the self-reference of the narrator from Shuoshude 說書的 (the story-teller) to Zuoshude 作書的 (the story-writer).1

Two salient points emerge from this: Zhao, like most commentators on late Qing ction, makes no reference in his detailed study of the narrator to the red-light ction of the nineteenth century, which does problematise from mid-century onwards the position of the narrator (and is undoubtedly not contained within the phrase “the best of late Qing novels”). The second is the change from story-teller to story-writer, pointing to a shift from the pose of oral narration, to an author-narrator gure and emphasis on the written text. While Zhao, whose examples for this come from the 1900s onwards, suggests that the late Qing narrators make less of this shift than they might, remaining the traditional “nonparticipant semi-explicit narrator” of vernacular ction,2 the modication is pregured in a complex way in earlier red-light works. There is

1

Henry Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator, 53. Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator, 49. The phrase describes a narrator who comments on events but is not part of them; a secure, mostly omniscient, domineering gure who can intervene in the narrative at will. 2

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no simple chronological transformation among narrators from shuo to zuo, but a variety of means to account for the writing and presenting of the novel, attesting to a greater focus on the text, and on the triangular author-narrator-text relationship. At a time when the scholarship of the kaozheng movement was still inuencing textual research, the author of Fengyue meng created in the 1840s a novel in which the quest to settle the identity of the narrator of the text echoes that to locate meaning in the text; while the Taiping army was systematically annexing the lower Yangzi valley and destroying libraries full of precious texts, the author of Huayue hen constructed an elaborate scenario of an illiterate local nding a text hidden away in a chest; as magazine and newspaper printing took off on imported presses in the 1890s, the author of the novel Haishang hua liezhuan “concocted a book within a dream,” and then published this ction in fortnightly instalments. Narrators of red-light works are involved in various ways in nding and narrating the text, and implicated in its writing. The narrator is frequently a complex gure, obscured by anonymity or an unclear relationship with the author, and the transmission of the narrative by narrator to reader can become so convoluted in the framing processes of the text as to leave the reader wondering how the initial transcription was supposed to have taken place, and by whom. This chapter explores the relations between narrator, author and text, considering how the status of the novel as ction is linked to the elusive gure of the author, and arguing that while the deliberate complexities point towards a newly negotiated author gure—tentatively exploring a position as named gure, who explicitly authors a ctive narrative—they also imply a wider rethinking of the notion of ction, of the writing of text and relation of text to life.3 The rst section below describes the strategies for introducing the narrator (and author) in each of the texts. An attempt at analysing these scenarios follows, with sections on the Author-Narrator relationship;

3

Alexander Des Forges has written that “a specic and complex interaction between text, narrator and ‘author’ characterizes the genre.” “From Source Text to ‘Reality Observed’: the Creation of the ‘Author’ in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Vernacular Fiction,” CLEAR Vol. 22, Dec. 2000. While many of the arguments in this chapter, which draws heavily on Chapter Three of my 1999 DPhil. thesis, are similar to those Des Forges publishes in his article, here the focus is the primacy of the text in constituting those relationships. For an alternative categorisation of the role of author and narrator in these texts, see Hanan, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004), Chapter One, “The Narrator’s Voice before the ‘Fiction Revolution.’ ”

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Narrator-Text relationship, the central framed chapters, and narratorial contradictions. A coda reprises the theme of this volume, the effect of edition, revealing how different editions of texts can produce different readings of the author and narrator. 2.1

Introducing Narrator and Text

Red-light authors went to considerable lengths inventing textual ploys for introducing their narrators. The author may create a named author for his text, may himself be in some way identied with his narrator, or may allow his narrator to transmit (and comment upon) his text for him. The author-gure may write the text of the novel in a dream, where the book itself is the text of the dream (as in Haishang hua liezhuan) or set down the contents of a vision afterwards (as in Qinglou meng). A completed narrative comes into the possession of a third party in Fengyue meng and Huayue hen,4 where the narrator presents the narrative as received in the former case, and in his own telling in the latter. There may be no named narrator, as in Pinhua baojian. The narrator may appear as a character in the text: Fengyue meng and Haishang hua liezhuan both have the supposed author of the named text appearing in the rst chapter, before disappearing, one in a puff of smoke and the other sauntering jauntily out of the narrative vision. The supposed or pseudonymous author of the named text may make a guest appearance, as occurs in Qinglou meng and Haishang hua liezhuan, a double narrator complicating the record of transmission. Even in Jiu wei gui, where there is no prologue frame set up to discuss textual transmission, instances of character involvement in the written narration are still documented. A case could be made for divisions among courtesan novels based on the text’s construal of its own ctionality.5

4 This device is used in various later works too: in Niehai hua 孽海華 a beautiful stranger hands an investigative journalist the text of a novel, with the assurance that it is a true story. In a plot nesse comparable to Qinglou meng, at the beginning of Ershi nian mudu zhi guai zhuang a manuscript is offered for sale in a market place near Shanghai, but it is so expensive that no one purchases it until a beggar glancing through notes the astonishing similarity to his own life story and, fated, is given the work, which he edits and submits for publication—producing a volume that bears the same name as the journal which the reader is reading. This ploy would evidently lose some of its ingenuity by later editions. (These scenarios are also discussed in Dolehelová-Velingerová, The Chinese Novel, 61, 66.) 5 See discussion in Chapter Four below of Patrick Hanan’s two streams of romantic and realistic works, based on plot outcomes and proximity to a historical reality. Other

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(i) Chen Sen’s Pinhua baojian, (ca. 1848) a tale of love relationships between various young men and a group of boy actors,6 opens with a discourse on qing (love, sentiments), describing the attributes of qing among the sons of ofcials, actors and base people respectively. Those who deal in qing in the pleasure quarters are divided into two broad categories, the lewd (xie 邪) and the orthodox (zheng 正), an organizing principle for relationships in the work. Pinhua baojian is one of only two works of Lu Xun’s xiaxie group without a characterised narrator, and this unknown gure begins: What I have seen and heard, I have written into a book, in total forming 64 juan, called Pinhua baojian (Precious mirror of ranked owers), also called Yi qing yi shi 怡情佚史 (A history of delighting the heart in pleasure).7

The work is a ‘mirror,’ reecting without distortion; or a ‘history,’ with connotations of veriable accuracy. That the work has two names is already suggestive of multiple or variant editions. References to the witnessing of events and to the writing and the naming of the novel indicate a rst person authorial narrator, but the following line: This book has no name attached, so in the end we do not know what period, what year, where and by whom it was written.

troubles this scenario, suggesting a narrator unrelated to the author who has come across the work and is re-presenting it to us, the readers. An emphasis on the text as undatable and anonymously authored continues elements of the Honglou meng tradition, where the discourse sets up a deliberate contrast between ction and the more lauded mode of history writing.8 A de-historicized narrative, implies the author of Honglou meng, holds a universal validity. Pinhua baojian leaves aside the paradoxical metaphysical framings of Honglou meng, but draws on the assumptions of ctional validity proclaimed in the earlier work. If this is history, there is no way of verifying the words of the unknown author. The narrator of Pinhua baojian is not cocooned in a mythic net of identity, but the world possibilities for categorising the novels include e.g. city and garden, or pre- and post1890s, or, as suggested here, the tales’ construal of their own ctionality. 6 Dates given refer to rst published editions and should usually be taken as a terminus ante quem; where this date is known to differ widely from date of writing this will be indicated. For a more detailed synopsis of this work see David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor; see also Keith McMahon, “Precious Mirror;” and Starr, “Shifting Boundaries.” 7 Pinhua baojian (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji), 1. 8 See e.g. Yu, Rereading the Stone, 52.

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of the narrator in the text is entangled with the real of the textual world as he postulates on events, points out changes of tack and new characters, and reveals his omniscience in the odd ash of insider information. After the initial discussion on qing, the narrative of Pinhua baojian moves into conventional biographical mode, and ends without overt reference to the narrator or further revelation about the provenance of the text. Although there is no narrator sauntering into view or scrambling up inspirational hillsides in the opening chapters of Pinhua baojian as in later red-light ction, and the text itself is not miraculously found or transcribed, the pre-chapter writings demonstrate why this may be so. In Pinhua baojian the prefaces discuss at length the construction of author and of text, and so it can be read in a similar mode to the later works. There is a narratorial framing, but this has not made it into the text proper (and in editions which eliminate the prefaces, may never do so). In the authorial and the commentarial prefaces, the writer discusses the ‘mirage’ of writing, but whether this describes lived life, or the relationships between life and autobiographical text, is left ambiguous. Two prefaces are present in the 1848/9 edition: an authorial one written by Shi Han Shi 石函氏 (Stone Letter Clansman, or Ms. Stone Book-covering) and one by the editor of the text, Huan Zhong Liao Huan Jushi 幻終了幻居室 (The Retired Scholar who has nished with Illusion in the Midst of Illusion). These prefaces are in beautiful cursive scripts in 1849 editions, as if in letter form, an open letter to the reader.9 Shi Han Shi’s preface portrays a reluctant author, prodded into writing at each stage by others. The long, protracted process of composition is more akin to the production of memoirs: a certain friend had praised Shi Han Shi’s writing skills and elegant style, and suggested he try his hand at writing a freer piece of writing. The author discloses his literary credentials for the reader: “At that time I enjoyed studying classical literature, poems, fu 賦 ballads and such; but regarded novels with 9

The British Library and SOAS hold 1849 (?) editions. The British Library version catalogued in 1908 looks very similar, but is not identical, to an undated edition from the Henry McAleavy collection in SOAS, and is evidently from fairly late on in the print run, with several worn characters. Close examination suggests that the blocks for the frontispiece have been either been worn and touched up between the two printings, or pasted over and re-carved; the prefaces appear to be entirely new carvings. The BL and SOAS have two further near-identical later editions, the SOAS one helpfully labelled ‘Ch’ing print,’ with ne but dense text (20 columns of 43 characters). None of these editions carry commentary. Curiously some modern editions (such as the 1993 Qilu Shushe) switch round the ordering of the prefaces, beginning with that of the ‘editor,’ as if wanting to comment on the author before presenting him.

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disdain.” This is the clearest stance among any of the implied authors on ction as a genre, and is corroborated by the low priority given to completing the novel. After sitting and failing the state exams, Shi Han Shi entered a period of idle depression, during which time he acquainted himself with the delights of singing girls and actors, learning a little of chastity and depravity in the realm of emotions, of elegance and vulgarity in speech, and truth and falsity in writings on love. A friend again encouraged him to write a xiaoshuo based on his own generation, which would “speak of things people have never spoken of,” and the preface writer surreptitiously followed this advice, producing fty thousand words, which were deemed passable. Two or three further volumes followed, and soon more, with readers coming thick and fast to borrow them, before writer’s block set in and Stone Letter dropped the project. The following year he found employment as secretary to a prefect, and while his boss was busy with government affairs spent much time in the company of other congenial but little-accomplished scholars in the courtesan houses. For the next eight years, the book remained on the back burner. When the time came to return to the capital, he followed his employer on the slow boat back, and during that meandering stretch was again encouraged to nish the novel, writing at night by candlelight. Once again failing the state examination, Shi Han Shi realised that, aged forty, he was never going to advance in the world, and without the nances to travel back south, hung around the capital. An ofcial who had read the draft of the rst fteen chapters a decade earlier saw the more recent portion and persuaded him that having completed half, it would be a waste to throw the enterprise away. All of these are mirages [“towers in the sea”], there is no substance in them. The allure I speak of is all allure that I have never seen; the sentiments I speak of are all sentiments that I would like to express in my mind; the sounds and smiling faces I write of, the beauty and ugliness, depravity and orthodoxy, down to the most depraved and lascivious, unclean profanities and all such troublesome matters, are all events which I deduced must exist in the world. As for where my brush took itself, it was like water going through a pass, or a boat down rapids, or a thoroughbred leaping a stream, I listened to where it stopped and rested there. It is not that I enjoyed carving out frivolous words. . . . As for this book, I know that it rebels against the true path, and will be despised by [real] writers; but something may be gleaned from it: this depends on the reader.

The pseudonymous Shi Han Shi claims in this long preface to be the author of the novel, presenting a detailed and credible autobiography, as well as outlining the history of how the text came to be written. His

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words lead to an avowal of ction: that the world of the novel is “as if true,” credible and verisimilar because of Shi Han Shi’s long experience of entertainment culture. Neither author not text materialise ex nihilo, but the text is a ctive creation drawing on the lived experience of the writer. (ii) Huayue hen (preface 1858; edition 1888), like the preceding novel, opens with a comment on qing, and its all-pervading nature through the centuries. The opening line of the second chapter, on the actors of the capital being the nest in the Empire, is almost identical to the very rst line of Pinhua baojian, creating an immediate afnity with the earlier text. The narrator of the rst chapter, which deals entirely with the identity of the text and has very little to do with the content of the ‘story’ chapters, treats us to a lengthy preamble describing how he chanced upon the work and came to broadcast it. I was searching for relatives and couldn’t nd them; I wandered about destitute and came to Fen County, in the Gushe hills, where I gathered sticks for fuel and planted vegetables for my living. Five years ago, when the spring ice was beginning to thaw, I was hoeing the ground when suddenly the earth caved into a hole. In the hole was an iron chest, and in it were hidden several volumes of a book. The book was called Huayue hen; the author’s name was not written on the cover and there were no details of dating. Having opened it and had a look, I waited for a middle-man to pass it on. In the fth month of that year, the drought-demon was particularly cruel, and bare earth stretched for hundreds of miles around. I was trying to help my mother avoid famine at Taiyuan, but our circumstances were terrible and we had no means of livelihood. I suddenly realised the Heavens had given me this book, to supply me with food and clothing. And so I copied out a volume by hand, and each day I take it along with me to the tea houses, strike up my clappers and earn a few hundred cash. I carry grain back with me, and present a sack to my old mother. As for right and wrong, truth and falsity in the book, I don’t know about that. But each day among those who listen to my book, some laugh, some cry, some sigh. . . . Today the weather is ne, if you are at leisure with nothing to do, why not make your way along to the Yiweiliang tea-stand at Liugangkou and listen to me narrate Huayue hen?10

We know that this rst chapter of Huayue hen was probably written after the bulk of the novel and added to the front of the work,11 so the fact that

10

Huayue hen (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji), 2–3. According to Xie Zhangting’s 謝章鋌 memoirs Ke yu xu lu 課餘續錄, chapters 2–44 were written in 1858 and chapters one and 45–52 after 1862. See Shang Cheng’s 11

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the author has chosen to present his book in this way demands attention. The narrator has “copied out” the text by hand and narrates it orally to an audience. This seems to be a process enacted for the reader’s benet, unlike the copying of Honglou meng, through which act the narrator undergoes a Daoist cycle of conversion, turning the book into his own story.12 Copying is an act of learning, and of catharsis, but also usually an active process of editing. The copying out of Huayue hen both reects and subverts the actual conditions of composition and dissemination of the novel. The central forty chapters were written over a period of a few months and presented chapter by chapter by Wei Xiuren to his employer, with a celebratory gathering marking the production of each couple of chapters. In aligning himself with the narrator and recipient of a nished text, the author Wei is gently downplaying the extent of his effort and laughing at his pecuniary needs, which his biography suggests were genuine motivations for writing. Wei’s parody enables him to represent his work as a traditional tale and himself presumably as a traditional literatus, while the ctitiousness of such a representation, of a laboriously written narrative as an oral tale, undermines his adopted stance. The pretence of an oral narrator is maintained in this classic example of a ‘discovered text’ narrated at second-hand. In the next chapter a reference is made, for example, to a character Wei Chizhu 韋癡珠, “as described in the last chapter,” yet the pre-narrated story would have had no ‘rst chapter’ describing the narrator himself. As in Qinglou meng, however, the nal chapter of the work reveals a possible source for the original narration. A curious divination scene takes place in which spiritwriting spells out three poems into the sand at a gathering near Wei’s old lover’s dwelling in the presence of a passing ofcial, who happens to be a former friend of Wei. At the end of these poems, written from the ‘other side’ where the traces of bitter human life are but vague, dreamlike memories, the planchette announces “I am Wei Chizhu,” leaving the onlookers in reverential but uncomprehending silence. The pensive ofcial enquires as to the history of the building, and discovers the connection with the famed courtesan. “No wonder Chizhu descended [as a spirit]!” he sighs, at which point a bearded old man hears him speaking, introduces himself as an old retainer who now looks after the

introduction to the Shanghai Guji Huayue hen, 2; Gu Qiyin’s preface to the Zhonghua Shuju edition, 3. 12 Li Wai-yee, Enchantment and Disenchantment, 177.

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Wei ancestral tablet, and agrees to take the ofcial the following day to offer respects. The ofcial is structurally useful in being literate and able to comprehend the poems, but with no connection to the nal scene, where the novel itself appears. That night, the old retainer (Guan Shikuan 管士寬) has a dream of a drama in which a concise re-run of events in the lives of the protagonists of the novel is enacted, beginning with a soliloquy on the hard life and drift into brothels of the prostitute Liu Wuxian 劉梧仙, Wei’s lover. Shikuan wakes, crying out, before realising his visions were a dream. On his pillow however, lies a book, with Huayue hen written on the cover and a couplet beside it. Shikuan treasures the book, but cannot read, and is unwilling to give it to anyone; when he is about to die he buries it. Given that the book he nds could not logically contain this last episode, we conclude this is added by the narrator, but the line demarcating the story and this narrated text is not clear, and it is not evident how our original narrator could have come across this information unless it were written into his copy of the text of Huayue hen. The double construction emphasises the ctive status of the text, but risks destroying its own frame of reference in the process, as the reader is required to construct (deconstruct?) the text in progress. (iii) Fengyue meng (preface 1848; printed edition 1883/6) is one of the novels that playfully questions its own existence, and delights in an ambiguity of voice between author and narrator, and between the gure of the known author of the work and that of the narrator who appears in the text. “As for Fengyue meng, why was the book written?” asks the selfreexive author of the preface. The answer pregures the self-justicatory premise for most courtesan novels: because when I was a youth I acted stupidly and against propriety, and this account of the pitfalls of such a lifestyle has been written to warn you and future generations against retracing my tracks. A question hovers over the identity of the narrator. The quest that a reader may undertake to search out the real narrative voice of the novel echoes the quest of the narrator himself for an understanding of his misspent youth: an attempt to create a retroactive judgement on, and meaning for, that life. The narrator’s path to self-enlightenment through his reading of the text mirrors the author’s journey towards self-awareness through the transcribing of his life onto paper: the two processes meet temporally in the receipt of the text. The double framing of the narrative of Fengyue meng, where he who narrates the rst chapter is not

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the narrator of the novel, becomes a triple framing with the addition of the preface, where the author Han Shang Meng Ren 邗上蒙人 (Ignorant Man of Yangzhou) describes how he collated his reminiscences of thirty years into a book and entitled it Fengyue meng. In this act the author elides himself with the gure given within the rst chapter as the writer of the text, Guo Lairen 過來人. Read alongside modern prefaces which describe the contents and publishing history of the novel, any single or authentic narrator of the story recedes further into the distance, parodying textual scholars’ search for an authoritative text. The status of the narrative is relegated to a dream world of shady brothel dealings, where the preface author can laugh in print: “If you say it’s real then it’s real, if you say it’s a dream then it’s a dream, tee hee, ha ha.” A dialogue between the “I” of Chapter One and the writer of Fengyue meng, the eremite Guo Lairen,13 is acted out for the reader when the two meet, halfway up a quasi-mythical mountain. I, the narrator of the rst chapter, whom the reader has assumed to be the narrator of the novel, am idly walking in the countryside, confused by the love and kindness I have met in the brothels, when I come across a stone inscribed with “Mountain of Self-Deception, Pool without Depth.” Climbing up the twisted mountain path, I nd two old people sitting together, one youthful-looking and ruddy, the other white-haired, sans teeth. I—cognizant or not of the double meaning of my words—explain that I have lost my way, and ask what lies ahead. Answered in riddle (“The way ahead is far and vast, the road behind hard to gauge”), I am told that one of the men is the matchmaker Man in the Moon, (who reappears in a cameo role in a number of courtesan works) and the other is Guo, prematurely aged from his former dalliance in the courtesan houses. Guo mentions how he has escaped from the entrapments of the brothels, and has edited a book on the events he witnessed in those days: an unadulterated eyewitness account, which the two are just re-reading. This book is given to me (the narrator of this rst chapter) to take away, as my journey up the mountain was evidently pre-ordained: perhaps through it I may bring enlightenment to the world? The following morning the scenery has all changed, and I am left wondering if my nocturnal visitation from a woman of the night was a bad dream, but nd the book still in my cloak, a reminder of the previous day’s encounter.

13 過來任, a homonym of guolairen 過來人, ‘veteran,’ ‘the enlightened one,’ or as Hanan translates, ‘roué.’

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I take out the novel from my sleeve, glance at the cover, and read in surprise its poetic inscription. If the reader wants to know what sort of people the novel describes and what they do, and can bear the longwindedness, then read on . . . In this way the reader of Fengyue meng is reading the text either alongside this (ex)narrator, or via the narrator’s re-narration of the pre-written text that has come into his possession. As in other red-light works, the lengths to which the novelist will go to create a complex narratorial gure can produce insoluble problems of logic, as when Guo Lairen reappears in the nal chapter of the work, only to vanish again, leaving the reader wondering who has narrated this nal section and when the hand-over of ink-brush and viewpoint occurred. The close resonance between ‘my’ experience of thirty years enchanted in the brothels,14 the early years of Guo, author of Fengyue meng as revealed within the narrative, and Han Shang Meng Ren, author of the author, creates the impression of a single, multi-faceted voice, whose afnities can be exploited but whose identity remains elusive and can always be denied. This migrating author-narrator gure, whose identity is both evoked and concealed by the narrative, appears in varying incarnations across nineteenth-century red-light texts. His gure is linked by association to the truth claims of the narratives: to the plays on truth/falsity and on dreams/reality through which the ctionality of texts is explored. As in Honglou meng, the real is false and the false real: perhaps the vicarious ctional life of the author is just as valid and truthful as his parallel real life. Simplistic claims from later critics that the authors were merely recording their own lived experiences and left obvious pointers towards their identity in the texts such as the surname of the protagonist, or place names that recur in preface and text, underplay this complex structuring of authorial representation and ctionality. A sense of shifting voices and narratorial positions is heightened by the frame of Fengyue meng and its deliberately didactic recasting of events. The voice of the early sections of Chapters One and Two is that of an old narrator projecting his vision backwards, an informative, paternal gure, setting the background and offering analysis, whereas the voice of the main narrative moves from commentator to observer, projecting itself as a more neutral witness of events. The mode of narration for these ‘framed’ chapters is consonant with the timeframe of writing, emphasising the disjunction.

14

Fengyue meng, 19.

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(iv) The persona of the narrator in Qinglou meng (1878) is also deliberately ambiguous, and like Pinhua baojian, the narrating of events takes place through a mirror—here a physical rather than metaphoric one.15 The opening prefaces again inform our reading, one a richly allusive, difcult piece of classical prose penned by the scholar-author and ction writer Zou Tao, describing the colourful panache of the courtesan world and its bitter aftertaste,16 and the second a shorter preface written by ‘Jin Huhua’ 金湖花. This second preface is a conventionalised piece lamenting the downfall that awaits the immoderate, and asserts that Qinglou meng was intended to cause bright young men who have lost their senses, lured by the wiles of courtesans, to turn and take a look at their lives as if in a mirror. The voice of the narrator is complicated by a second narrator given in the nal chapter of the novel, who is introduced as the author of the work, effacing the previous narrator. Chapter One begins with an opening ci poem followed with a comment by ‘Mu Zhen Shan Ren 幕真山人,’ ‘The man of the mountains who admires Truth.’ In this comment Mu Zhen Shan Ren rails against contemporary youth in a thematic continuation of the second preface and expounds on the nature of qing (love, sentiments), a major theme of the novel. The tone is once more that of a wise elder, who has learnt through experience, and berates modern youth for thinking they know something of qing but whose debauched life shows they are far from a true understanding, as he himself was when young. The appearance of the pseudonymous author in the very rst paragraph of the novel appears to reinforce the autobiographical connection that commentators have pointed to as the narrative norm and moral raison d’être of the courtesan novel. However, this

15 This is picked up and commented on by the chapter-opening comments of Zou Tao, see e.g. Qinglou meng, (Beijing: Beijing Daxue edition, 1990) p.1 of main text. “We know that people throughout the book, and events throughout the book, are all within the mirror. There is nothing to rely on in the emptiness, nothing to see in the void; we can go so far as to say that the people in the mirror cannot be relied on, that events in the mirror are fundamentally untrustworthy.” 16 Zou’s preface is also notable for its defence of the value of ‘low’ ction. He comments: “When the three hundred poems were preserved, they did not cut out the airs of Zheng. The wonderful deeds of a prosperous age are recorded in good times. If you only succeed in pointing out and setting down principles of righteousness, enlightened people will be left utterly empty—what’s the harm in entertainment literature, or pleasant speech? This book lifts up owery phrases and sets forward ourishing customs, it is a ‘precious raft’ to lead us across the maze; it really is a ne warning for awakening the world.” Qinglou meng, Preface, 2.

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author-gure within the narrative, who is initially conated with the narrator, builds up the play of ction by itself being demarcated as a role within the text. Whether narratorial or authorial, this role cannot be transferred unproblematically to a human agent. The narrative continues in the rst person (wo 我) as Mu Zhen Shan Ren describes a Daoist monk entering his room and brandishing a bronze mirror containing all the good deeds of his life; the mirror a lens to bring “clarity” (ming 明) to him, as it is a lens to bring the text to the reader. In the mirror the narrator sees 36 fairy maidens and is then called forward to be reborn into the Jin family of Suzhou, where he nds himself changed into a child. Through mirror and dream, rst-person narrative becomes third-person, the ‘I’ seeing myself in another guise. The author-narrator Mu Zhen Shan Ren perceives and creates his own ctional reincarnation, delighting in transgressing his own boundaries of representation. Having grown up, one day Jin Yixiang sees the monk return, and then awakes, this all having been a dream, prompting the comment: When I awoke and thought carefully about the events in the mirror, I felt I could trace all of the details. At that point, the false and empty became substance, truth was created from illusion, and so I recorded all that was done and happened in the mirror and turned it into a book, which came to 16 volumes and 64 chapters in total, and called it Qihong 綺紅 (A Minor History of Beautiful Rouge), also called Qinglou meng (Dream of Green Mansions).17 Although the people in it did not exist, some of the events did. If the reader wishes to regard these as reality, that’s ne, if not, that’s ne too; as it is said, “What forms a dream within a dream is still all dream; when a book is created outside a book, it is still counted as a book.”18

The passage resembles the prefatorial stance on ction of Pinhua baojian. It is the “traces of the surreal” (huan ji 幻跡) that are recorded, just as the traces and vestiges formed an important narrating metaphor for Huayue hen. That which he saw in the mirror Mu Zhen Shan Ren (or an older Jin) then records, beginning with a brief history of the life of Jin Yixiang. The narrative continues in the third person, narrated by Mu Zhen Shan Ren, the ‘I’ and ‘not I’: he who saw, while in a previous existence, this present life depicted in a mirror. In the nal chapter of the work this convoluted identity is further complicated as Jin and his erstwhile

17 If honglou (red chambers) were the quarters within a residence for young ladies, the qinglou (green chambers) bring associations of brothel suites. 18 Qinglou meng, 4.

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brothel friends, who have by now attained the Dao, return to earth and see people buying a newly published book, the anecdotal work Qinglou meng, written by a good friend of Jin’s named Yu 俞. This doppelgänger whose “nature was identical to [ Jin] Yixiang’s,” and whose stylish manner was also alike,19 wrote the work partly to record Yixiang’s deeds, and partly as a portrayal of himself. On reading the work, Yixiang is delighted that nd that the book details his own life story. As Yu is the author’s own surname, critics such as the editor of this Qilu Shushe edition of the book have freely identied this second narrator with the person of the author Yu Da 俞達.20 These name games again parody the traditional dualism of real versus ctional narrator, and of seeing the ‘real’ author lurking in each narrator. The overlaid narrator of the nal chapter assumes a name identical with the author: a practice common in wenyan but not vernacular literature until the May Fourth elevation of the genre.21 The narrator revealed in the rst chapter of Qinglou meng borrows the author’s improvised pen-name, but the narrator imposed retroactively on the novel in the nal chapter goes beyond that and takes a name identical with the author’s own name. As an incarnation of the protagonist Jin Yixiang, the narrator Mu Zhen Shan Ren is no longer ‘impersonal’ but a participant in the events of the narrative, if removed in time. The position of the narrator is not foregrounded in the novel outside of the book-end frame, and in the intervening 62 chapters we are rarely alerted to his presence.22

19

Qinglou meng, 241. Qinglou meng, 243. 21 Henry Zhao argues that this is not only due to the low position of vernacular literature because “[n]ot until the late Qing did the author begin to let the narrator even borrow his improvised pen-name which could not in the least harm the author’s reputation. The main reason was that the narrator’s position is generically reserved for that impersonal, non-participant semi-implicit story-teller, who refuses to have a name and survives by staying nameless and faceless.” See Henry Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator, 49–50, and further discussion below. 22 For exceptions, see, for example, Qinglou meng p.169: “Reader, what sort of person would you say this was?;” p. 233: “Reader, what do you say about these four: Jin, Zou, Yao and Ye, why do they all want to seek the Dao, and once they seek it, all become different people?” Having answered his own question, the narrator then states: “This is not something which I, the writer, say recklessly without having looked into,” p. 234. While these do not preclude the possibility of the narrator himself being the author, a third case sets up a distinct, non-participant narratorial voice, but is the only instance of its kind: “The writer also would like to head to the Jin household for the birthday celebrations,” p. 190. These last two cases occur at the very end of chapters, immediately preceding the conventional “If you want to see what follows, 20

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(v) Haishang hua liezhuan (1892–) begins with a reference to the name of the work and its author, Hua Ye Lian Nong 花也戀農 ‘Even the owers pity me.’ Barthes wrote thirty years ago that giving a text an author was to impose a limit on the text, furnishing it with a nal signied:23 in the late Qing we see authors raising their ction to literary status by attaching a name, only to deny the critic his reign by pointing to retreating levels of authorship. Admonitory and exhortatory statements ll the rst chapter of this work, where the narrator laments how even fathers and brothers cannot keep young men away from the depravity of the brothels. The blurring of once-xed narrational categories of voice continues as the preface and rst chapter lose their distinction. If someone really experienced were to tell his tale, writes the narrator in this self-justicatory opening, that might save youngsters from being drawn into the brothel life—leaving one wondering why previous examples of the genre have been so ineffective. The novel has been written to warn young men that even if a woman appears to be as beautiful as Xi Shi 西施 at the time, she will be as shrewish as a yaksha after, if she is as sweet as a long-suffering wife now, she will soon become as poisonous as a viper.24 The reader of Haishang hua liezhuan is asked, either rhetorically by Hua Ye Lian Nong or by a second narrator, what sort of person he would say this narrator/author was. After a geographical and biographical background, we are told that he was someone who daily lived in a dream, but who doesn’t himself believe it is a dream, but thinks it is true and has written a book about it. Only when he had concocted this book within a dream did he wake from the dream in the book. Reader, don’t dream on . . .25

The novel describes the ction of reality, written from within that lived ction. The quotation stands as a metaphorical description of language, of story-telling and of book-making—and a call to the reader to awake from a narrow reading of ction. This book arose from a dream of Hua

please read the next chapter” formula, and could be seen as remnant comment, for the most part discarded. 23 Roland Barthes, “The Death of The Author,” in David Lodge, ed., Modern Criticism and Theory. 24 Haishang hua liezhuan, 1. In works such as Fengyue meng and Qinglou meng, these sentiments are penned in the preface. 25 Haishang hua liezhuan, 1. The similarities between the entrance of the narrator of Haishang hua and that of Fengyue meng are notable.

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Ye Lian Nong’s, continues the narrator, who describes how he sensed his body oating off and found himself in a sea of owers. Just when Hua Ye Lian Nong is drowning, he opens his mouth to cry out and nds himself by a bridge at the intersection of the Chinese and foreign sectors of Shanghai. “Reader, do you think Hua Ye Lian Nong has woken or not? . . . But he thinks he has woken up . . .” comments the narrator. The suggestion of an oneiric reality is present in several red-light works, with texts produced either during a dream or upon waking. The perceived reality of the dream world at the point of experience parallels the process of reading ction, where the story is real for the duration of reading. In the transcriptions and re-telling of dreams, narratorship coalesces with authorship, yet the difculties of a human narrator transcribing the dreams of another individual recur. Once the narrator of Haishang hua has woken from his dream, he comes off the ramp of the bridge and bumps into one of the major characters of the novel, Zhao Puzhai. Zhao is angered by the collision and is only persuaded to let the author/narrator go by a local policeman. Hua Ye Lian Nong saunters off, exit stage right, never to reappear in person in the narrative. In many of these nineteenth-century novels, the title of the work appears somewhere in the rst or last pages: a sign that the work is supposed to have entered general literary consciousness, with an existence in the real world beyond the world of the novel. The relationship between the material and the virtual text (i.e. the physical novel text, and the story told) is played out in diverse ways, but is given particular prominence in Haishang hua liezhuan. More than a literary game, it points to a questioning of the value of writing, and of the life of the author: both his ctional incarnation, and by extension, his self in the non-ctional world to which the reader is constantly referred. Han Bangqing’s novel has been singled out for its realism, yet in the insertion of a reality external to the text in the form of that text itself, and the parallel instance of the narrator/author being present in the rst scenes of the novel, the text moves beyond concepts of realism where ctional truth is based on verisimilitude, reecting a reality external to the text: here the real and the surreal coexist.26 “Verisimilitude within unabashed fabrication” has been suggested as the route Chinese authors of the time chose to represented these new and avowedly ctive worlds,27 but perhaps the

26

Cf. Michael Rifaterre, Fictional Truth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1990), xiii. Andrew Plaks, quoted also in Rolston, ed., How to Read the Chinese Novel, 112 and in Lu, From Historicity to Fictionality, 134. 27

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mimesis of ction itself is closer to that which courtesan authors were attempting in their contorted framing devices. (vi) Jiu wei gui, rst published in the early years of the twentieth century,28 opens in mythological mode, with a commentary on the changing signication of gui 龜 (turtle) from a good omen portending riches, to a symbol for a cuckolded husband. A nameless narrator invites everyone to listen to the tale of change, in traditional oral-narration style: “Please all listen quietly, and let me get down to telling my tale.”29 The narrator of Jiu wei gui, like that of Pinhua baojian, is not described, although he is characterised to a greater degree than others, and speaks as the implied author. Since the setting of the novel is the event of its narration, the intrusion of a story-teller into the tale cannot exactly destroy suspension of belief, but the combination of a nameless and intrusive narrator in a written context is troubling to both a traditional and a modern reader. This novel of mine is called Jiu wei gui, it is the portrait of a wealthy man who obtained ofce. This high ofcial did not keep his door curtain in good repair [i.e. he did not keep strictly separate men’s and women’s chambers] and he caused much ridicule, taking advantage of me, and so I compiled this novel. Enough idle talk, the novel returns to its true tale.30

So begins the narrator, before switching to a conventional biographical description of his protagonist. Though unnamed, and with an unstated relation to the text, the narrator of Jiu wei gui is more evident in his rhetorical questions, control of the timeline, and conscious narration of the psychological nature of transactions among characters, than his narrative predecessors.31 He is also notably on a much closer lexical and mental level to his characters than the earlier narrators.32 While the ending to the novel provides no

28

Published serially between 1906–10 in the Shen Bao pictorial Dianshizhai Huabao. Jiu wei gui, 1. 30 Jiu wei gui, 1. 31 This style of narrator, termed third person rhetorical, Dolehelová-Velingerová characterises as present in the true qianze 譴責 stories, giving examples such as Jiu wei gui and Li Baojia’s The Bureaucrats (Dolehelová-Velingerová, 64–5). Donald Holoch, in his essay in the same volume, attributes the appearance of this intensely rhetorical mode of narrative during the last decade of the Qing to the new condence of writers in the value of ction and their consciousness of mission (p. 86), although as we have seen, the former is apparent much earlier than the turn of the century. 32 Jean Duval notes a similarity between the narrator’s judgements and Zhang Qiugu, the central protagonist’s opinions. Jean Duval, “The Nine-tailed Turtle: Pornography or ‘Fiction of Exposure’?” in Dolehelová-Velingerová, ed., The Chinese Novel, 181; although this is true in general, distance does open up between the narrator and implied author 29

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further revelation as to his identity, there are suggestions of character complicity in the narration. When the protagonist Qiugu’s unusually high spirits at a banquet and drinking session lead his friend to probe the reason for this, he replies: There’s a logic behind it: what if someone in the future writes our affairs up in a novel—it couldn’t be without this type of banquet. I’m just preparing a situation for the author.33

The narrator concludes the novel on the following page with the adage that there are still many tales of laughable gures from the ofcial world to be told, but these are too many to list, and the novel shall have to count as concluded at this point. The very explicit presence of the narrator in this novel proclaims a very different approach to the construction of ctionality in the text than in most previous works. The frames of textual discovery and narratorial connection to the author are absent. Whereas the ubiquitous narrator of the work proclaims the text as ction, it is a ction less closely spliced to the life of the author, creating a different rationale for its writing and type of comment on the brothel scene. There is no longer a perceived need for red-light ction to be tied to the life of its author either as an exemplary model or a reection upon his spent life: the creation of a ctive world and the tales that unfold therein are justication enough for their own existence. Where earlier courtesan works had not quite let go of their reality claims, by Jiu wei gui the reality of the ctional world is no longer in need of demonstration.34 A ctive ction had come of age. 2.2

Figuring the Narrator

Author and narrator have often been conated in Chinese ction criticism,35 and the relation between the two in red-light ction hardly lends

at various points: see, for example, the reading of women’s jealousy and the chapterend couplet in Chapter Ten. 33 Jiu wei gui, 913. 34 As critics of English ction have noted, when readers came to accept the norms of literary realism, novelists tended to drop their claims to reality or ctionality. See e.g. Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 3. 35 Well-known critics such as Fang Zhengyao may interchange ‘author’ for ‘narrator’ when discussing narrative, and David Der-wei Wang writes of “Han [Bangqing]’s apathetic narratorial stance.” See Fang Zhengyao, Wan Qing xiaoshuo yanjiu, 310; David D.W. Wang,

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itself to terminological clarity. If the discussion which follows seems complex, it may be because the textual attribution presented by the narrators of the works is deliberately obfuscated. Through the narrator’s eyes and commentary we are guided through the traditional world of a Chinese text, provided with opinions on events and a consciousness of the reading process.36 Whether we are treated to a variant of narrator who aunts his position as a commentator and openly holds forth on the characters he describes, or one who is glimpsed only rarely behind his impersonal mask, his telling or re-telling of the story colours reception—particularly where we have been introduced to him in person. Emphasis on the gure of the narrator also sets the gender frame of these novels: they are not so much ‘courtesan novels’ as ‘client novels,’ centred around the reexive male perspective. In the novels that employ a frame, the gure of the narrator is linked in some way to the author, whether by a homophonic resonance of names, by a similarity in life stories as expounded in the preface, or even by the appearance within the text of a character bearing an identical name to the eponymous pseudonym. The nature of this relationship between author and narrator has been too often read as a simple masking or a direct correspondence, rather than as deection, an embodiment of the author’s retroactive questioning of his life. A critical conation of the two gures has undermined the deliberate ctional blend of authorial biography and imagination. Qing authors hiding behind pseudonyms and speaking through their narrators bring to mind nineteenth-century English authors appropriating the same means. Ever since Jane Austen’s male narrators and female author, or Brontë’s masculine pseudonym for the ‘autobiography’ Jane Eyre, it has been less easy for western critics to assume congruence between author and narrator. George Eliot beneted from an awareness that readers would conate the historical and implied authors in her choice of male pseudonym, and it was too “Edifying depravity” in Eva Hung, ed., Paradoxes of Traditional Chinese Literature (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1994), 245. A laxity in terminology indicates a general confusion in describing the delicate relationships between the two. Part of the problem in this analysis and in recent Chinese ction criticism has been over a basic question of terminology. In English, the term ‘narrator’ is usually used to designate the narrating voice or narrating consciousness within a story, yet in the novels here the construction of a second narrator, the presenter of this story, competes with the voice of this ‘original’ narrator, often closer to that of implied author. 36 In the six novels considered, the conict of language and voices is rarely resolved by recourse to the dominant voice of an omniscient author, as in realist ction, but allowed to remain contested.

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late after critics lauded the implied author’s morals to recant when they discovered the identity of an atheist adulteress.37 The name games that nineteenth-century females in Europe were forced to employ were drawn out in contemporary book reviews and journal essays, when reviewers of each gender mis-assigned texts on the basis of writing style. While few readers would have posited female authorship behind red-light pseudonyms, the doubly subordinate role of a writer of ction and a writer of morally suspect ction undoubtedly played a part in these authors engaging with the notion of historical and implied author.38 In the contorted narratorial relations described below, the red-light authors can be seen attempting to distinguish the implied or inferred author from the historical or empirical author, in a move that would allow them to evade traditional critical judgement of both themselves and their texts, creating a self-accepting author and ction. Patrick Hanan has written, “Of all the changes in techniques during the late Qing period, those regarding the narrator and center of consciousness, concerned as they are with the author’s writing persona, seem to be the most momentous.”39 Two main narratorial scenarios may be distinguished among the novels: in the rst there is no ostensible second narrator, no take-over point, and the voice which presents the rst paragraphs of a novel is maintained through to the close. Jiu wei gui forms an example of this type, along with Pinhua baojian. In the second set of cases, the narrating voice is an overlaid one, yet linked in some way to the narrator of the pre-written text: the text is framed by the tale of how the central story came to be written or narrated.40 In Fengyue meng, for example, the narra-

37 The implied author is that which can be constructed from the text alone, and has no life beyond the text. On the implied author, pseudonyms, Austen, Eliot and Brontë, see William Nelles, Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narratives (New York, Washington, DC: Peter Lang, 1997), 16–21. 38 Enquiry into critical narrative terminology in the Qing awaits a separate article; I am not yet convinced that this discussion can be substantiated with reference to Qing critical writings, but the terms appear to be justied from the texts. 39 Patrick Hanan, “Wu Jianren and the Narrator,” 551. This is at least as true for the author’s written persona. 40 As Des Forges has noted, these ‘text within a text’ framings rst appear in the mid-eighteenth century, but by the beginning of the twentieth, the ‘found MS’ was a standard means of beginning and ending narratives, and recurs in Ershi nian mudu zhi guai zhuang, Niehai hua, and Guanchang xian xing ji 官場現形記, as well as in Mao Dun and Lu Xun stories. “From Source Texts,” 68. A more extreme case of textual appearance and disappearance is seen in Wu Jianren’s 1905–08 Honglou meng sequel, Xin shitou ji 新石頭記 (New story of the Stone), described in Hanan, “Wu Jianren and

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tor of the rst chapter is presented very clearly as a separate gure from the narrator of the body of the text itself (the ‘general narrator’), and yet has met this narrator and sees his own experiences embodied in the text the latter presents. A variant on this model is Huayue hen, where the narrator has no connection with the volume of the novel he stumbles upon or the world of its inhabitants, and his tenuous links with the text suggest a parallel disconnection between author and text. The narrator of Huayue hen is the relator of a found story, the transmitter of another’s document, displaced from the creative role of auctor; his act of disownment shifts “the focus of the narrative to the being of the protagonist, to the authenticity of the document, to the verisimilar human life itself.”41 References within novels to a novel are frequently to the un-narrated story-text, which is credited with a separate existence from the novel which reaches us, consisting of the story + narration details, formed into a new, unnamed text held in the hand of the reader. This is very clear in Huayue hen, where the re-narrator describes nding the text of “the novel Huayue hen” in a buried chest. We know this is all a conceit, for the completed texts of the novels are the full works as we have them, inclusive of those prefatory or introductory chapters where the narrating agent’s role is described. Where the narrator is given an identity in the text, he is introduced in the rst or nal chapters and the novel is centred around his telling of the tale. Whereas some have suggested readers might skip the framing chapters introducing the narrator without losing any of the ‘story,’42 the introduction to the narrator sets in place the ctional frame under

the Narrator,” 568–78; for a discussion of the narrator of Ershi nian and its complex narratorial framings, which parallel those of the Qinglou meng, see also pp. 557–8. Unlike Ershi nian, although references to the writtenness of the novels are plenteous, the redlight novels discussed here do draw on diary or notation book entries: the ctional tale is completed, and more distanced from the implied author. 41 Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 16. In his chapter “Frame, Context, Prestructure,” Davis contrasts the framing and positioning of the author in Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Defoe’s Roxana. There are a surprising number of parallels in the attitudes towards external reality and their own authenticity between these two seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury European novels and the nineteenth-century Chinese novels. There are also similarities in the differences between the two European novels over the status of the practice of reading as between the earlier and later courtesan ction. 42 Cf. Eileen Chang’s comments on deleting the frame of Haishang hua in her translation, discussed below. For the reasons discussed above, the narratorial frame of Pinhua baojian expressed in the prefaces can be taken as analogous with that of the four novels with book-end frames.

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which the author is writing. The frame in most of the courtesan novels is not the author’s recording of the narrator’s telling of the story, as in traditional ction, but the narration of the implied author’s story by a reader, or the author-narrator himself. This creates a primary shift from narrated to written narrative. Henry Zhao characterised the narratological conventions of vernacular ction at the beginning of the twentieth century as crisis-ridden precisely because of problems in the narrator’s position, later to be resolved by the May Fourth writers designing their own narrative frames to introduce the narrator. In developing the argument that the distinction between frame and framed text creates the space for the author to emerge in the text, Des Forges likewise notes that although Fengyue meng, Huayue hen and Qinglou meng are very different tales, from exploitation to wish-fullment, “they are caught in quite similar paradoxes at the point where the framed narrative is to yield to the frame narrative, suggesting that the text-within-the-text structure was necessary, but that the contradictions inherent in this reclusive mode could not be resolved.”43 In the play between biography and ction the red-light novels present a more controlled narrator than critics have suggested, not one without contradictions in his position, but far more assured than a gure in crisis.44 The six courtesan novels show a continued development away from Hanan’s “simulated oral storyteller context,” superseded by a focus on written transmission. The body of the story is still re-narrated for the reader, but in the context of a complete, pre-written narrative, rather than a narrator making his tale up or elaborating from prompt books.45 43

Des Forges, “From Source Texts,” 72. Where different voices do occur, often in the moralistic versus hedonistic identities presented, these can produce a comment on the construction of ction and on the moral order reected in that ction. See Robert E. Hegel, “Unpredictability and Meaning in Ming-Qing Literati Novels,” in Eva Hung, ed., Paradoxes of Traditional Chinese Literature, for a development of the theory that narrative innovations in this period had a signicance beyond the literary works themselves and challenged the structures and validity of popular Confucian morality. 45 The “simulated oral storyteller” refers to all of the markers in the narrative that set the scene for an explicit narrator to be telling a tale to a group of listeners (one of whom usually includes the recording author); these markers include phrases such as “please listen carefully,” “if you want to know what happens next you will have to listen to the next instalment/chapter” etc. Hanan describes in The Chinese Vernacular Story three type of narration in traditional ction: commentary, description and presentation. A less explicit narrator in a novel alters the mode of each: poetry within the text, for example, can be viewed more as a written textual convention than as the commentarial voice of the narrator. (Commentarial poetry has often been viewed by critics as an anomaly in the march of progress of the novel, but in the manipulation that characters here make 44

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The two lines of development away from the simulated oral narrator that Rolston describes for works from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: one where the narrator’s presence drops away to a minimum, as in Rulin waishi, and a second where the story-teller is dramatised and brought to the foreground, as in Ernü yingxiong zhuan 兒女英雄傳, do not fully account for the narrator of many of the courtesan novels, who may be both dramatised and absent within a single text, differently constituted in the frame and the story.46 The multi-layered narrator who emerges is not quite of the ‘commentator-narrator’ mode, inasmuch as the conventions of that character required the pretence of a story transmitted orally from narrator to an audience. Neither is the courtesan narrator usually aware of another author of the work, on whom he may pass comment. This construction where the author trades on kinship with the narrator affects interpretations of the narrator as a commentator—and of the text as text.47 Whether rhetorical or objective, commenting in his own voice or implicitly in unassigned prose, the narrator is not a participating character in the story, but can interject subjective evaluation into the text. Where comment occurs, this is usually a mixture of character evaluation and judgments on the text itself, including the brilliance of the author, and varies from the occasional salutation to the reader in Qinglou meng or Huayue hen, to the full-blown “intrusive, inquisitive, commentating rhetorical narrator” of Jiu wei gui.48 The narrator may have to contend with commentary added later to the text, extensive in some editions of Qinglou meng, sporadic in editions of Huayue hen, and rare in editions of the other works. In various of the novels discussed, the narrator is both implicit and explicit, present in, and absent from, the narrative. He may be introduced in the rst or last chapters where two or

of poetic text to their own ends, and in its function in characterisation as well as use as a descriptive or aphoristic tool of the narrator, the poetry of courtesan novels evidences the writtenness of narration.) 46 Though narratorial intrusion is often minimal and rhetorical questions few, the courtesan narrator is not quite akin either to the latent narrator of Rolston’s third category either, and the texts do not approach the loose structures of Rulin waishi. 47 I.e. rather than miming speech or positing its own extra-textual origin. The division in traditional ction that structuralist-leaning critics have made between implicit and explicit narration, or between third person objective and third person rhetorical narration (see e.g. Fang Zhengyao, Wan Qing xiaoshuo yanjiu; Dolehelová-Velingerová, The Chinese Novel, 57–66) is not particularly helpful either in delineating the courtesan narrator. 48 Dolehelová-Velingerová, The Chinese Novel, 63.

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three layers of narrative protection are peeled away to reveal a named, male gure, linked in some crucial but ambiguous way to the author. In the remnant chapters this narrator mostly effaces himself from his recitation and is directly visible only in trace phrases, or the occasional appeal to the reader. During the unfolding of the main story-text the courtesan narrator is not usually visibly or audibly present, and the tale is projected as an impartial, neutral reporting of events. In this way the main text is imbued with the same objectivity to which journalism aspires, and something of the conditions of Qing brothels may be transmitted to uninitiated readers (or indeed, those using the novels as guides to the brothels, as commentators from Lu Xun onwards have noted with horror). This absent narrator presents himself as a disinterested witness, able to report male and female perspectives and give a true reection of lives spent in brothels, though the reader is ever dimly aware that this is the same gure who denounces that lifestyle and the fallen women in his incarnate form in introductory prefaces or chapters. This split-frame narrator acts as a literary muse of the author, transmitting his thoughts, but with his own self interposed between author and readers. The narrator is a screen against the probings of critics into the personal life of the author. Part of the story, yet outside, he is similar to the authors of many of the courtesan works, creators of texts ostensibly based on reminiscences of an earlier life, but who remain beyond this text. In oral narration models the narrator is the unmistakable sender of the narrative message, whereas here in ctional narrative he is reduced more to a narratological function, a creation of the author.49 This created gure can set his own level of resonance with the author, and in these texts he parries and spars with the author-gure, jostling him into the open. Dolehelová-Velingerová has argued that in late Qing texts the use of rst person in the interpretative frame of the prologue and epilogue is a rhetorical device derived from earlier oral narration, and “not necessarily an indication that the interpretation expressed the author’s opinion.”50 This is evidently so in the case of red-light novels, but the point is that whether we choose to view the tone of the narrator in the frame as authorial opinion or as set piece, the reader is given the choice and alerted to the dual possibility. This play between authorial

49 50

Henry Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator, 47. Dolehelová-Velingerová, The Chinese Novel, 60.

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biography and ctive creation is at the heart of the cloaked narratorauthor relations and delimits characterisation in the novels. If the goal of reading is communing with the author, courtesan novelists have produced an elusive author with an evasive identity, to tease the reader in the manner of the many riddles that ll the earlier texts. The consciousness of the narrator is produced from complex perspectives, and the search for a true or authorial voice—the traditional goal of classical reading51—is shown to be futile. Those novels that create a split psyche challenge the assumption that the evaluation of literature necessarily includes the personality of the author.52 This challenge encompasses the mode of transmission: the telling of the tale is a ctional set-up, therefore the work itself is also ctional and does not bear immediate recourse to reality. A challenge to the correlation of authorial self with narrator has been seen with some justication as a means of self-protection among the classically minded, offended by the promotion of debased protagonists whose lives scarcely serve as commendable models. It is also, obviously, a means of circumventing censorship. A separation of narrator from author serves both ends: it frees the author from personal slur, as he cannot be condemned for the acts of a ctional ego, but also enables him to retain a truth content in depicting a known reality without that depiction necessarily incurring social opprobrium. It is a nely-tuned position for the courtesan author to take, caught between the postures of societal disapproval and selfdisapproval. The challenge to seeing the author mirrored in his narrator (or characters) implicitly also challenges the function of ction, where didacticism and belief in social enhancement were fundamental to the traditional purpose of portraying characters. These are not just negative models to inspire readers to the opposite behaviour, as claimed in the prefaces of works such as Fengyue meng, but a view of ction which allows it legitimately to explore darker aspects of human nature—and to present these as entertainment.

51 David Rolston discusses the goals of reading as communing with the author, consonant with the belief that one’s personality is necessarily revealed in the act of writing, and as “epireading,” the recovery of the original creative act of the author. See Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 112–13; 116. As shown in Chapter One above, the modern editors have reinstated the author to a position of prominence in the reading process. 52 Rolston, for example, notes that traditional Chinese readers required an author to identify with, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 8.

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The authors have aided the reader in this disassociation, since the narrator is deliberately different from our projected image of the author in certain key ways. Where personied, the gure of the narrator or the one who causes the transmission of the physical book appears in avowedly asexual form: as a mountain eremite (Fengyue meng); as a bearded septuagenarian (Huayue hen), as a Daoist priest (Qinglou meng). The selfidentity of the author, in the sense of his sexuality, is immediately problematised: what do the narratorial contortions mean? If we take the frame at face value, the production of the text is predicated upon the repudiation of the sexual self. Brothel sex is without issue: renunciation brings forth a substitute progeny. There is little overt condemnation of the proclivities of ‘reasonable’ male characters in the novels: the sexually abusive are castigated, and the duped provide fodder for amusement, but most of the characters are decidedly sympathetic, and some, such as Wei Chizhu in Huayue hen or Yuan You in Fengyue meng, seem intended to draw a sigh of sadness. Through the brothel setting, memoirs are recorded of the way of life of the idle leisured, interspersed with drinking games and beautiful women. These are not guilty self-agellations, although elements of confession are present in the pervasive broken relationships. Some critics have seen the western search for the self as alien to the Chinese tradition: yet these features of self-analysis, social criticism and personal confession are precisely reected in the content and framing of nineteenth-century red-light ction.53 2.3

Narrator, Text and Transmission: Mirrors and Frames

Mirror and dream are favoured tropes for transmission of the conceptual narrative, while the physical books are dug up, handed over, and commented on by characters. The creation or the writing of the book is alluded to time and again, both in works like Jiu wei gui without the novel’s physical manifestation in the prologue, and in works where the text is practically characterized in the frame. The title of Pinhua baojian refers to the novel as a ‘Precious mirror;’ the events narrated in Qinglou meng are initially seen through a Daoist’s mirror; a mirror opens the nal set of spirit poems in Huayue hen; the narrator of Fengyue meng awakes from a dream, as does the narrator of Haishang hua liezhuan; the text of 53 Cf. early twentieth-century Japanese literature discussed by Dolehelová-Velingerová, The Chinese Novel, 71.

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Huayue hen is seen in a dream; Qinglou meng and Fengyue meng are both entitled ‘Dream of.’ Dreams and mirrors appear in many other nineteenth-century works and are certainly not restricted to red-light ction, though their concentration here prompts reection.54 Mirrors are hardly new metaphors in ction criticism; they are, as Rolston writes, “used to speak of the impartiality of the process of reection rather than the reection itself. Mirrors have no ego to distort the way they reect objects;” the mirror is a symbol for the “desired kind of objectivity” that enables both judges in court and literary critics to make fair judgement.55 A mirror reects, it also distorts; the character can connote insubstantial reections, as in water, as well as a warning— to be warned by example, as if by the reection of oneself in a mirror. The jian 鑒 character of Precious mirror is the same as that of the Comprehensive mirror (tong jian 通鑒), the eleventh-century voluminous history by Sima Guang, where jian indicates to scrutinize and criticize, as well as to warn. The narrators of Qinglou meng and Pinhua baojian suggest alternative titles for the works in each rst chapter, both referring to the story as ‘history’ (shi 史). Volumes have been written on the narrative shift from 56 history to ctionality in Chinese literature, and in making reference to the work as history, this seam is brought to the surface. The notion of history refers the reader to historical records, and to the Shiji, where Sima Qian’s anecdotal biographies formed the archetypal writing of lived experience. The narrators allude to historical writing in jest: they are not anticipating a reading of brothel relationships with the gravitas of canonical history, but they are suggesting that the biographies of characters (and by extension, the narrating of the given narrator’s life, with its tenuous threads back to the author) reect truth, whether real referents or the ‘as if ’ mode described in Pinhua baojian. Dreams in traditional ction were often a prognostic device, giving the hero a vision of his future so that on awakening he could elect a wiser course of action, but in the twisted red-light works, the action is complete and the dream a means of recording for the reader, not of

54 Other late Qing works employing these tropes include Jinghua yuan 鏡花園, Haishang fanhua meng, Lao Can youji etc. In Lao Can’s Travels, a dream sequence opens where the narrator, on board a sinking ship symbolizing China, awakes as he is about to drown, with certain resemblances to Haishang hua liezhuan. 55 Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 169. 56 See, for a prime example, Sheldon Hsiao-Peng Lu’s comprehensive study, From Historicity to Fictionality.

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altering the course of biography.57 There can be no averted catastrophe for the protagonist, but the possibility of redemption remains for the reader, should (s)he take heed. The ambiguities of dream reality have been noted: Stephen Cheng reads the dream frame of Haishang hua liezhuan, where narrator Hua Ye Lian Nong wakes drowning in a sea of owers, as a comment on the text, not the author: “It is not clear whether Han is implying that the novel, as ction, possesses dreamlike qualities, or that human life, which the novel reects, is lled with dream-illusions.”58 In a textual parallel to the dreams, the text is not prophetic either; the narrative is not revelatory, a preordained trajectory, but the post facto recording of a life lived. Unlike Stone in Honglou meng, or the stele whose text records halfway through Jinghua yuan (Destiny of owers in the mirror) the events about to happen in the second half of the novel, the red-light frames do not present the unravelling of a known fate. 2.3.1

Frames

Why should authors choose to set up such complex schemes for describing and accounting for the transmission of their novels, from author to narrator and narrator to reader? The structural device known variously as ‘nested boxes,’ ‘Chinese boxes’ or ‘Russian dolls’ where one narrative is embedded within another is “so widely found in literature of all cultures and periods as to approach universality,”59 and analyses of its usage in other literatures nd resonance in Qing China. The critic Gerard Genette has suggested more acutely that the presence of narrative embedding is an indicator of ctionality itself.60 Were, then, the frames of red-light novels anything more than a conventionalised ploy to evade censorship by proclaiming the moral worthiness of the tale as a warning to stay away from brothel entrapments?61

57

See e.g. Dolehelová-Velingerová, The Chinese Novel, 61. Stephen Cheng, “Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai and Its Narrative Methods,” in Liu Ts’un-yan, ed., Chinese Middlebrow Fiction, 115. 59 William Nelles, Frameworks, 1. As Nelles goes on to point out, the subject is much studied, with, for example, twenty-two dissertations on the topic in English literature in the US from 1981–95 (p. 2). 60 “On imagine mal un historien ou un mémorialiste laissant à l’un de ses ‘personnages’ le soin d’assumer une part importante de son récit . . . la presence du récit métadiégétique est donc un indice assez plausible de ctionalité—même si son absence n’indique rien.” Gerard Genette, Fiction et diction (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 79. 61 For one example of the numerous earlier works which present a telling of the 58

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Framing is an act of communication, an enacting of the story-telling relationship within a text, inviting the reader to ponder the relationship between the tale and the telling.62 In foregrounding the narration of the story, frames play on the persona of the narrator and author, and play on the narrative act, the writing of ction. Frames form a moral commentary on the text, but one which need not be accepted by either the implied reader or author. A formal effect of the frame is to set the boundaries of the text, giving a ‘natural’ setting, but requiring the reader to examine the bounds around the text: the borders where shifts happen are critical to reading. While the dramatic impact of the frame emphasizes the current situation of the narrator (in red-light ction, often a wise, sad old man), the frame can also be used to undermine a narrator’s credibility. The novels studied here mainly utilize a simple ‘picture frame’ structure, with a single story framed by fairly brief opening and closing passages. As in Honglou meng, there are other framed sections within the narrative, particularly where characters experience different modes of being in dreams or visions, but these are not related to the overall recitation of the text.63 The frame, where the story-text is embedded in an account of its transmission, serves principally to reinforce the reader’s awareness of the ctive nature of the text, raised also through the dream imagery and supernatural incursions. The world of ction is shown to be a strange one which parallels the real world, but remains separate, a world of permeable boundaries between ction and life—as between the supernatural and real worlds in the novels. The frames in the novels described are mainly disjunctive, in Triviños’ terms, since they act as a critique or negation of the rst level story:64 their function being to question the internal perspective of the story. tale as a warning to others, or an exculpation, see Martin Huang’s discussion of the narrator of Chipo zhuang, “granted a chance to tell her story partly because she has led others to believe this is also an expression of her remorse,” in Huang, Desire, 128. 62 The standard sociological textbook on the concept of framing remains Gregory Bateson’s A Theory of Play and Fantasy (New York: Ballantine, 1954), where he demonstrates that no communication act can be understood without reference to a metamessage. Literary theorists have adopted the term for use with self-referential literature. For discussion of the various uses of framing in this paragraph and their proponents, see Nelles, Frameworks, 137–52. 63 Other intercalated sections of narrative (which Nelles terms “ontological frames”) include drama texts written out in full such as in Fengyue meng Chapter 7 or Huayue hen Chapter 60, discussed more fully in Chapter Four. 64 Gilberto Triviños, “Los relatos de relatos,” Estudios Filológicos 15 (1980): 145–178; see esp. 158–59. Triviños’ article is discussed in Nelles, Frameworks, 143–44.

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To analyse the frame is to analyse the organisation of experience. On one level the narrator stands as a metaphor for the courtesan author’s organisation of his life, and as the mediator through which he proclaims his experience. He is also the medium between these two worlds of earthly and supernatural life in those novels, such as Qinglou meng, which support a dual reality. Interest in how to reect and mediate lived experience ts with trends towards scientic methods of enquiry prevalent in the late nineteenth century, and with the sweeping changes in the life stories of the literati, as well as in the forms of language used to transmit those experiences. At a time when language reform and usage were constantly debated it is unsurprising that these authors chose to highlight the linguistic aspects of the construction of reality itself, reected in the ctional constructions of their novels.65 Minor frame-breaks reinforce reality by connecting the historic and ctive worlds, suggesting a continuity between the two, whereas truly metactional works highlight the disjunction, exposing the ontological distinctness of real and ctional.66 A frame-break such as the re-appearance at the end of the narrative of Guo Lairen, the named author of Fengyue meng, could be seen as forming a continuous link between text, named author and real author, or read as an incursion of a second level of textual reality, questioning the correspondence of ctional structures with extra-textual reality. Other incursions of reality do less to rupture the frame: the characterisation of Lin Daiyu (character in Honglou meng and nineteenth-century courtesan) in Jiu wei gui is an example of this order, where the blending of the historical with the ctional reinforces the illusion that ction reects the real. Whatever the exact correspondence anticipated between text and reality, in confusing the decoding of transmission the courtesan authors are abrogating their own authority to create a unique meaning for their work, and devolving the act of

65 As Patricia Waugh writes, “through the foregrounding and analysis of framing activities [metactional novels] highlight the extent to which we are aware neither historical experiences nor literary ction are unmediated or unprocessed or non-linguistic.” Waugh, Metaction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984), 30. It is tempting to ascribe a similar function to the attention drawn to the framing devices in the courtesan novels. In the ctional plays on their own lives, these extend to the authors’ viewing reality itself as a construct. Readily apparent ambiguities between ctions and reality in their own lives include such dichotomies as the good Confucian scholar versus brothel idler, and spectacular lover versus absent husband. 66 Waugh, Metaction, 31. Cf. Davis, Factual Fictions, 16. As Davis writes, maximum enframing occurs as a result of an abrupt intrusion of reality into the ctional construct of the narrative.

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reading to the reader. A further function of the frame in emphasising the constructed nature of the text lies in this opening up of the text to a critical reading.67 Metaphysical games with narrator and author embody a quest into the degree to which the self may be known: part of an ongoing enquiry into the self within traditional novels, developing into the brazen self-analysis of literature in the decades succeeding the ourishing of courtesan texts. In the disappearing acts of the author-characters in Fengyue meng or Haishang hua liezhuan we see a symbolic evaporation of the author or self from the text. Simultaneously, however, the author is re-inscribed into the work via multiple gestures and suggestions: name resonances, the insertion of biographical details, preface allusions, and narratorial consciousness. Just as the text is indeterminate, material and virtual and the narrator is both present and absent from sections of the text, so the author too demands to be both read into and apart from his novel. Others have read this slightly differently. For Des Forges, the frame opens up the possibility of the construction of the ‘author’ as a central gure in long vernacular literature, allowing him to take over pole position from the narrator.68 The frame is the context for the text, forming a background to the drama and establishing textual authority in the absence of a pre-existing source. For Des Forges, Honglou meng, whose homage is written into so many aspects of red-light ction, was the rst work to posit an entirely ctional context for itself, dispensing with the source narrative and reader familiarity, and doing so by creating its own ‘missing’ context by engraving its own inception into its textual form. Later in the courtesan genre, when the anxiety of missing pre-existing sources has faded, there is no transmission scenario: observed reality has nally become its own authority. Des Forges argues that an emphasis on the creation of the text seen in Fengyue meng in the shift from Honglou meng’s opening question “why was this book written” to “how was this book written,” demonstrates an author creating the frame narrative, with the space between the two frames permitting a new form of author. Even if we take the question “hu wei er zuo ye 胡為而作也?” to mean “how” (the syntax could also imply why, paralleling the Stone’s question), it is difcult to see this as just a question of authorship, as Des Forges implies, since the question “how

67 68

Cf. McGann, “How to Read a Book,” 28. Des Forges, “From Source Texts,” 68–9, 73–75.

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was this entextualised” is of equal prominence in the novel. The play on textuality throughout the novel suggests that the process of writing and printing is also alluded to here, as well as authorship, the transmission of the text pointing beyond the author to the whole structure of writing, memory and mortality.69 The point of the convoluted textual frame, it would seem, is not cleverly to direct the reader to the human author and allow a biographical reading, but to suggest the impossibility of such straightforward linkages, and the disjunctures that lenses, mirrors and different frames of reference impose. The new ‘reality observed’ model of authorship is expressed in ction: it is precisely the imagined constitution which is drawing on the textual authority.70 In their convoluted displays of textual transmission, the novelists are certainly signalling the encoding processes and transmission of the authorial self. In comparison to the frameless caizi jiaren predecessors with their implicit narrators, deliberations on authorial and narratorial roles in ction precisely make prominent the role of the author in its construction. This open foray into ctional self-othering ought to temper the critic’s over-reading of the authorial self into a work, but, as seen, has rarely done so for the modern critics and editors of courtesan

69 The point is moot because Des Forges, like other critics, may be too willing to follow the author’s ruses in linking the name in the text to the person behind the text. Des Forges seems to move from this position (p. 79) in stating that the identity of the author is unclear, and not identical with the narrator gure, but reiterates that the author of the framed narrative stands in for the author of the whole. Des Forges lists the hints scattered throughout the works referring to the real author (such as the same experience of 30 years in brothels of the narrator and author of Fengyue meng, the play within Huayue hen written by the character Han Hesheng, or the appearance of an author named Yu in the text of Qinglou meng) and relates this to the autobiographical schema of nineteenth-century novels, which form part of “a general rhetorical movement towards presentation of a vernacular ction as a product of the author’s observations and experiences.” I would give more weight to the many means by which such straightforward readings are thwarted or twisted. 70 Where Des Forges claims that in Haishang hua liezhuan there is no pre-written narrative device and no preface, with a transparent lens replacing the omniscient narrator, this is only partially accurate, since the opening of the novel does speak of text, book and writtenness, as described above. Des Forges notes that Qilu deng earlier in 1777 inserted a claim to its own ctionality, but that this novel “was not published until the 1920s.” The date of publication was not usually the date of ‘making public,’ and rst printing cannot be taken as the date before which other readers would not be aware of a text. Other critics have noted the authenticating function of signalling the means of transmission: Dolehelová-Velingerová sees the recording of the transmission of text in late Qing works such as Niehai hua as a “transitional” device used to authenticate the story.

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novels. Analyses which argue for an autobiographical reading of the lives of their authors71 are anticipated and rejected in many of these red-light works. By the level of conscious othering and distancing set out in the narratives, autobiographical agenda are questioned and subverted. Anthony Yu writes that the narrative of Honglou meng is as much a story about a piece of stone (Stone as a protagonist) as about what that story is (Stone as script, as ctive writing) and how it is to be received. This argument, Yu claims, follows the text itself, which suggests that the experience of one protagonist, and his quest for enlightenment and disentanglement from the net of desire, can trope the process of genesis and reception of ction.72 The enlightenment of characters in courtesan ction is occasionally connected to the writing process, but more often is an accomplished fact by the beginning of the narrative, which itself is the record of that past awareness, retold for the readers’ sake. As such there is little suspense in the progressive enlightenment of narrator or character, and the unfolding is cast as a historical account whose outcome is indicated at the outset. The import of the inscription and reception of the courtesan works takes place at the narrator-reader interface, in questioning how the reader receives the text (both materially and conceptually) rather than at the interchange of character and text. That the courtesan texts are set in a contemporary frame, unlike traditional historical romances, emphasises that the primary contextual focus is not the self-contained ction of the story-world, but the interplay between that world and the experience of the reader.73

71 Such as that of Martin Huang, which posits the all-pervasive autobiographical nature of eighteenth-century novels, and argues that by reading a novel such as Rulin waishi the life of Wu Jingzi can be reconstructed. Huang writes for example: “The writing of the novel becomes a retrospective journey through which he [Wu Jingzi] tries to redeem his past self by reconstructing that self in the form of a series of others.” Huang, Literati and Self-Re/Presentation, 53. 72 Yu, Rereading the Stone, 111. 73 If “who speaks?” is the fundamental question to be addressed by narratology, this is again deliberately problematised in courtesan works to produce this reading, where the narratee at one level is intradiegetic—the author himself, listening to, or rereading, his own tale. We, the reader, follow this author in his reading, at the same time as the tale is narrated to us, the reader. While the narrative frames for all of the courtesan novels with embedded tales are ‘vertical’ in their embedding (i.e. consecutive narratives at different diegetic levels, rather than ‘horizontal’ embedding where texts at the same diegetic levels are narrated by different narrators) in cases like Qinglou meng or Fengyue meng the confusion of who is narrating what to whom is so great as to leave unresolved even this, and the text recedes, from a metadiegetic level towards tetradiegetic narration and ever onwards.

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The Central Story and the Fiction of Unmediated Transmission

If the frames playfully reect on the process of writing ction and the attachment of ction to the life of its author, these debates fade away during the story proper. Although the central story is the realm of the narrator, he is here a means to an end, his presence ranging from Haishang hua liezhuan’s transparent narrator to the chatty traditional pose of Jiu wei gui. The narrator is not so much absent from the central chapters, as unobtrusively present, re-emerging in the tensions of voice, point of view and omniscience. Even where the text is devoid of references to ‘I’ (zai xia 在下) or direct appeals to a reader-narratee, the narrator can be read into the text in unassigned commentary, and particularly in the poetic voice of the songs and verse sections of the novels, highlighted typographically in modern texts. The voice of the narrator merges with the voice of poetry which lls so many pages of the mid-century texts. In the vocalisation of poetry— which has to be declaimed by the reader, if not aloud then at least in mental pronunciation of each syllable—the voices of reader, narrator and poet sound together. Sentiments of judgement and criticism which pervade women’s verse and song are diffused by the ambiguity of voice. Poetry can be used to provide an ironic, even subversive, comment on the text and its predominantly male perspective, such as the songs of the courtesans Fenglin 鳳林 and Shuanglin 雙林 in Chapter Seven of Fengyue meng, where other characters read jokes and innuendos into songs, inviting the reader to entertain a double reading. Insinuation and provocation are possible in song where not in speech, and challenge the narrator’s unitary voice. Unattributed poetry the reader tends to ascribe to the narrator. At the end of a celebratory propitiation ceremony for the gods that the female courtesans of Fengyue meng persuade their menfolk to attend, a poem from the Yangzhou yanhua zhuzhici 揚州煙花竹枝詞 (Folk songs of Yangzhou brothels) is quoted, a song book that characters often refer to. “With a hundred tricks and a thousand methods they cheat guests of money/Availing themselves of pleasure they say they are repaying the gods,”74 quotes the narrator, indulging in some covert moralising. Such unmarked passages can be read in other voices too: the subconscious murmurings of conscience, or fear, by characters present in the scene, for example, producing added depth in the ambiguity. Sometimes the 74

Fengyue meng, 154.

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narrator of a novel is willing to shed suspicion on his own position by hinting that characters may be deluding themselves or are deliberately misleading others, as where the courtesan Yuexiang suggests she is pregnant to the cash-rich Lu Shu.75 All may not be as the narrative leads one to suppose: in taking sides against a character the narrator directs the reader and inserts a consciousness of narrative subterfuge into the text. In harbouring suspicions, a narrator personalises himself and exposes his presence in the text. The narrator of Chen Sen’s Pinhua baojian is as close to an extradiegetic and heterodiegetic76 model as may be found in red-light literature before the 1890s, and is consequently seen to be invested with a signicant degree of objectivity, but even here the presence of the narrator is clear. Chen Sen’s novel provides a useful study of the detailed means by which a narrator exposes and conceals his presence, and of the methods authors utilise to veil a consciousness of narratorial presence from the text and from the reader’s mind. A relative dearth of self-appellants scattered through the novel allows a sense of detached reporting. The narrator is not the domineering gure of the traditional vernacular narratives, but in his occasional incursions into the text is more akin to the ‘uneasy’ gure of Henry Zhao’s late Qing (1902–17). While direct commentary from the narrator is rare, occasional passages of analysis appear under a formulaic ‘ni shuo’ 你說 (“you might say”), or other such reexive markers, mostly too eeting to set up an overt character-narratee. Crucial to our understanding of the text is the distance that emerges very gradually between the narrator and implied author. The narrator presents relationships between ‘pure’ boys and actors throughout the early course of the novel in a neutral or positive light, as beautiful romances whose qing elicits our sympathy, but by the end of the novel we are in no doubt that such relationships cannot succeed in the long term and are inherently inferior to the heterosexual relationships sanctioned by marriage which supply the happy ending. The voice of the narrator, or narrative position is not always consistent, and may merge imperceptibly with a character’s voice.77 Such

75

Fengyue meng, 141. I.e. produces the narrative yet is entirely absent from it; the terms are Genette’s. For a contrasting account of a story more free of an overt narratorial presence, see Hanan’s discussion of Wu Jianren’s “The Homework Inspection” in “Wu Jianren and the Narrator,” 551–2. 77 Michael Egan has noted the blurring of the line between character and narrator discourse in his study of Hen hai. He represents it as an important structural change 76

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inconsistencies across the novels attest to the narrative experimentation of the authors. Occasionally a shift of perspective occurs, leaving the narrating agent not quite xed as rst or third person, suspended between character and narrator.78 This is seen, for example, in the opening paragraph of Chapter 29 where the actor Qinyan visits his ill lover: When Qinyan 琴言 reached the Mei 梅 household, he was extremely afraid, and was fully expecting a humiliating reception. But when he had seen Lady Yan 顏 not only did she not censure him, but was even sympathetic and ordered him to go and comfort Ziyu 子玉, which was beyond his expectations. In his heart he was now happy and now sad, but not knowing what state Ziyu was in and how he might comfort him, he could only follow Lady Yan’s orders, and, composing his expression, he came to Ziyu’s bedroom.79

In the absence of any subject marker, and given the knowledge of the character’s emotions that the narrator has, it is tempting to align the focalizer, through whose vision we view the scene, with the narrator and translate as: . . . beyond my imaginings. In my heart I was both happy and sad, but, not knowing what state Ziyu was in and how I was going to comfort him, I could only follow Lady Yan’s instructions, and, pulling myself together, entered Ziyu’s bedroom.

Chinese language novels, especially those in classical Chinese, are supremely able to leave the narrative voice undened, and Chen Sen manoeuvres his text as close to the boundaries of voices as possible, entering Barthes’ realm where “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away . . .”80 Creating an indeterminacy of focalization allows for the retention of the authority imparted to the external narrator-focalizer whilst simultaneously presenting the possibility of an internal perspective, increasing the interest value and approachability of the character. Indeterminacy prevents too the focalizer (here narrator) in late Qing narrative, though again we see evidence of late Qing ‘innovations’ pregured in nineteenth-century works. Michael Egan, “Characterisation in Sea of Woe” in Dolehelová-Velingerová, ed., The Chinese Novel, 170. 78 It has been suggested to me that this is merely a function of the syntax of classical Chinese: simply unpunctuated monologue; while I tend to disagree, accepting this removes the element of experimentation, not the ambiguity of the voice. 79 Pinhua baojian, 229. 80 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Lodge, ed., Modern Criticism and Theory, 168.

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from becoming too perceptible as a character and rendering his vision open to question.81 Occasionally a subject pronoun wo (I) is slipped in and the reader is alerted to the new perspective, although the transition point from the narrator’s voice may not be isolated. As illness is reciprocated, Ziyu muses about his lover, the narrative voice in a passage of free indirect discourse shifting with a scarcely evident seam from the third to the rst person and back: At the banquet everyone was relaxed, and all were happy. Only Ziyu was thinking of Qinyan lying ill on his bed, knowing that he was in a weak state of mind, his medicine stove half full of ashes, totally closed in behind green windows; not knowing how unhappy he was. And he also knows that I’m here today at this lively place, so he must be particularly lonely. How can I go to him there now and comfort him a bit? . . . Ah, although it seems all cloudy before my eyes, how could I not have such thoughts? At this point Ziyu’s colour drained, so he excused himself from the table on the pretext of drunkenness and went to lie on a kang; the others took no notice of him (p. 141).

The ambiguity of voice is evident even in translation, as is the primary position of the implicit narrator, through whose perception the whole dialogue is ltered. Discord between the idyll of the scene of shing, drinking and idle chatting, and Ziyu’s private worries is portrayed by the transition to interior monologue. Similar switches between psychonarration (i.e. narratorial, third-person) and free indirect style have been described for modern Chinese works such as Camel Xiangzi, where Lao She’s use of the technique has been attributed to adaptations of European ction, but a prototype of this form can be seen in Qing works.82 It is signicant that we only hear the inside thoughts directly of the characters Ziyu and Qinyan, those most inclined by nature to reection, most central to the plot and potentially to the author’s concerns. There are strong reasons for Chen Sen to structure a narrative in this way: as O’Neill writes, “a character who is also a focalizer has a special claim

81

See P. O’Neill, Fictions of Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 89. See Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity —China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 106–7, 112. As Liu notes, this style frees novelistic discourse from rigidly reporting what the narrator sees and what the characters say or think. Chinese can switch modes much more easily than Indo-European languages from the point of view of grammar, and the free indirect style can retain more ambiguity, giving the illusion of a transparent mind. (pp.112–13). For a comprehensive discussion of different modes of narration in turn-of-the-century ction, see Hanan’s “Wu Jianren and the Narrator.” 82

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not only on a reader’s attention but also on their sympathy . . .”;83 the privileging of characters in this way dovetails with hierarchies of knowledge and power in the text expressed through narratorial positions.84 A narrator who can detect and transcribe the inner thoughts of his characters undermines his credibility as an impartial (human) witness, a contradiction which persists throughout the early courtesan texts. Even where the narrative in Pinhua baojian does not shift to the voice of a character, there are scenes where the narrator aligns himself with the mental position and perspective of a character present in a scene through a privileged insight into a particular character’s thoughts or perceptions. In Chapter 59, where Zhongqing is watching his newly reunited friends Qinyan and Ziyu, we appreciate the action through his eyes, and the single perspective of the narrator is splintered by the focalizer. In Chapter 30, Qinyan is alone, a situation which seems to require an interior monologue, since the narrative elsewhere demands a witness present to record a narrative voice—even where none of those on scene are known to the reader or could have provided the narration. Scenes are usually peopled by twos or groups, and the rst-person narrative of the solo scenes is awkward. Qinyan is musing on the passing of time and his own humiliation, like a ower trampled in mud; linguistically he is both object of the passage and its subject; at no point does he take control of the narrating of his story, but the reader hears him thinking and then watches his thinking described by the narrator, in shifts which are imperceptible when skimming through the passage and disjointed when analysed slowly. Room for dissonance within the narrative is provided by sections of text which recapitulate recent events through the eyes of various characters, affording a second view in the re-telling, and the possibility of contradictory narrative voices. In practice however, this re-narration of events from the new mouthpiece concurs almost completely with that understood by the reader from the initial version. One of the most protracted examples of this is in Chapter 24 of Pinhua baojian, where Zhongqing is recounting events of the past couple of days which are already known to the reader. This re-focusing of the plot is one means of ensuring continuity in the narrative, and bears similarities to the technique of ‘implicit narration,’ chuancha that Han Bangqing claims to have invented

83 84

O’Neill, Fictions of Discourse, 96. Cf. Roger Webster, Studying Literary Theory (London: Arnold, 1990), 53.

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in his novel Haishang hua liezhuan, where “No event is told in its entirety all at once, and yet no thread is left out. Upon reading, one is aware of a ‘text behind the text.’ ”85 Events in Pinhua baojian are not split up and inserted in parts into the narrative as in Han’s novel, but the eshing out of previous events through discussion or their re-telling adds dimension to a linear narrative and subtly diffuses the voice of the narrator. 2.5

Narratorial Contradictions and Resolutions

Two interconnected areas of narratorial contradiction emerge in the internal transcription of a text: in the level of consciousness of the narrator, and in the vacillation between his roles as speaker and scribe. There is an evident tension between the narrator with a human character role in a text and one who displays his strategies for controlling the written narrative. The named human-eyewitness-of-events and redactor of the text introduced in the rst chapter of a novel ought to have limited vision, but the absent narrator whose description of events forms the main narrative is enabled to adopt the role of an omniscient author gure. These contradictions can be seen in texts from the earliest courtesan novels of the 1840s through to the 1890s: after this period a resolution comes frequently in the form of a departure from the split implicit/ explicit narrator in favour of a more consistently explicit voice. This causes problems of its own, but allows the narrator to signal his awareness of tensions created through his presence in the text. In the early text Fengyue meng we nd a predominantly unexposed narrator, which causes the reader to reect back to both Guo Lairen and the character who came into possession of the text of the novel, yet in places we also nd this narrator able to record dreams and the inner thoughts of characters. The narration, for example, of the courtesan Yuexiang’s omen-laden dream and waking86 is presented in ctional real time, not as the retrospective recounting of the dream by the character. This sits uneasily alongside a narrator who elsewhere is unable to hear conversations, or who occasionally deliberately limits his senses. This latter case gives the narrator far greater powers in authorship and structuring the text that he customarily adopts. Where the narration exceeds that

85 Haishang hua liezhuan, liyan 例言 appendix; translation from Stephen Cheng, “SingSong Girls of Shanghai,” 112. 86 Fengyue meng, 105.

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which a human agent could reasonably be expected to perceive (such as a description of Lu Shu and the courtesan Yuexiang playing footsie under a table) the information is introduced via a conventional marker for bypassing a narratorial illogicality. Through these various means, the narrator is present in the depths of a reader’s conscious. Why characters themselves are never furnished with such a reexive voice is related to the retention of the narrator’s proxy author-function. One of the main ways in the two later courtesan novels from the turn of the century are set apart from their predecessors is in the much more emphatic presence of the narrator in the narrative, not just as a named gure akin to a character within the text, as in the explicit narrators of the works discussed so far, but in his proprietorial control over the narrative itself. Through a more overt control of the timeline, for example, the narrator appropriates the authority of an author-gure for the text. In Zhang Chunfan’s Jiu wei gui, the narrator guides the reader across disjunctures in narrative linearity: here the guise of an implicit narrator is all but lost. Salient comparisons between Zhang’s novel and Han Bangqing’s Haishang hua liezhuan may be made in terms of narrative techniques, especially in the elaborate plotting of time. Han Bangqing readily acknowledges his debt to Rulin waishi for various aspects of the complex narration of Haishang hualie zhuan, but claims originality for his two concepts of ‘interweaving’ (chuancha 穿插) and ‘intermittent revelation’ (cangshan 藏刪). The former describes the cross-cutting of material in the text and the fusion of several storylines, and the latter a form of narratorial foreshadowing, or the laying of clues in the text to be understood retrospectively by the reader. The technique also encompasses the way events in a single plot line, such as the life of a character, are scattered throughout the novel. While Zhang undoubtedly drew on the techniques that Han was experimenting with in his novel and also with the concept of the novel as a stylistic problem, in Jiu wei gui notions of narrative time are further developed. In both novels the management of transitions between events or episodes is controlled by the narrator, with an emphasis on connections and the sense of a single timeline. Whereas in Haishang hua there is relatively little use of ashback and few parallel events, with time continually moving forward and the reader left to trace actions back and construe a chronology, in Jiu wei gui the narrator guides the reader in circumambulations away from the main narrative timeline, always to return to the present at their close. Time, and its relation to narrative chronology, is critical to an understanding of the novelty and achievements of Jiu wei gui as a text. The chronology of the narrative,

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with its prolonged instances of analepsis and ‘story within a story’ diversions, forms a focal point of interest in the text. Narrative time is very much linked to the gure of the narrator, who controls the timeline for the reader by signalling all departures from linear chronology.87 While manipulation of the timeline by the narrator of earlier courtesan novels is rare, it is certainly not an unknown technique. The narrator of Pinhua baojian, for example, retains the option of altering time sequences and lling in background knowledge for his readers. In Chapter 18, a self-contained story about Bai Juhua 白菊花, the new wife of the evil Xi Shiyi 奚十一 is narrated following a ‘yao shuo’ 要說.88 This is one in a limited series of vignettes about the lives of minor characters which enliven Pinhua baojian and allow for a broader social scope. For the most part, the narrator in this text devolves his incidental story telling to a character, such as the extended narration by the actor Er Xi 二喜 on the character of Xi Shiyi and his predilection for abusing young boys. In this instance (Chapter 19) the storytelling is framed as a live oral narration, with calls from the audience for Er Xi to cut the commentary and get on with the story. Chen Sen, like his successors half a century later, is meticulous in his attention to the passing of time in the novel, with frequent mention of the length of intervals between scenes, of the day or date, and of festivals or other important dates. Such attention to the chronological code of the narrative is indicative of a desire for sustaining verisimilitude.89 Apart from direct references to time, the changing seasons are marked by copious references to which owers are in bloom during garden scenes, and to characters’ reactions to the weather, such as where travel is impeded by snow. Although Stephen Cheng claims that Han Bangqing’s careful attention to dates in Haishang hua liezhuan broke with the tradition of the classic Chinese novel and showed the detailed planning involved in the novel,90 this sensibility is present in works of ction across the preceding half century, and is in full evidence here in Chen Sen’s early novel.

87

Returns to the main storyline or the narrative present are marked by a formulaic ‘xianhua xiu ti, shu gui zheng zhuan’ 閒話休提書歸正傳 (idle words over, the story returns to its true tale) or time phrase such as “on this day.” 88 Many of the markers used to draw attention back to the narrative, to re-cap, begin a new chapter or make a vague reference to passing time, are scarcely translatable. Like the ever-present Greek Ƭƣƫ, such conjunctions have little force in English. 89 Cf. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, on time consciousness, and Des Forges, ‘Street Talk and Alley Stories,’ Chapter Four. 90 Cheng, “Sing-Song Girls,” 113.

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By the time of Jiu wei gui (1906–10) traces of a modernity evidenced in a concern for time and time-keeping appear everywhere in print. The many examples of re-narration of episodes which occurred prior to the main storyline have in common a deliberate obfuscation over the event of re-narration, though all are presented as the writings of the narrator. Timeline shifts in the novel, both prolepsis and analepsis, are introduced via playful narrator-narratee exchange, where the narrator anticipates questions or problems from the reader and sets out to answer them, or in self-conscious musings from the narrator. This narrator is self-consciously present in the text, referring to himself occasionally: “As for the coarseness of [ Jin’s] natural disposition and the meanness of his actions, those are his true qualities; I haven’t got the energy to describe them one by one,” he comments.91 This narrator is not however omniscient, and backs himself into a somewhat untenable position further into the récit as he describes Jin coming out of the examination halls: “I don’t know what he did or what he wrote on the papers, I (zuoshu de, the one who wrote this book) never saw his scripts and cannot fully record them.”92 Again when narrating the tale of courtesan Lin Daiyu and her lover Qiu Ba 邱八, the narrator aunts his partial vision—as if to suggest that all he usually writes is authoritative testimony which he can personally verify: “Daiyu received Qiu Ba’s money-order, but I don’t know how much she nally paid back in debts and what amount she kept for herself, this is something I (zuoshu de) never saw and so shouldn’t speak of.”93 Within the same narrative episode, however, the narrator does have access to characters’ thoughts, as when Daiyu sees Qiu Ba has altered his stance, and she “was not at all afraid in her heart, and thought to herself: if I don’t cause this rupture with him, then how can I get him to relinquish his hold?” There is a logical difculty with a narrator who can read minds having limited focal vision. The character-narrator with limited eyewitness powers and human authority sits uneasily alongside an overall impression of the narrator as one who can leap through time and weave narrative threads together. The narrator to emerge from the text of Jiu wei gui is necessarily the one who pens moralising commentary and chapterend poems, hallmarks of traditional narrative, as well as the one who

91 92 93

Jiu wei gui, 76. Jiu wei gui, 82. Jiu wei gui, 131.

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addresses the reader and limits his vision. The poetry of this novel, trimmed to a bare minimum of chapter-end verses, serves more to bifurcate the personality of the narrator and point out the inconsistencies of such a voice set within a traditional framework than to unify the value-judgements of the narrative. There is no unied narratorial voice emerging from the combined self-characterising narrator and the poetic commentary, especially as the narrative voice is already perilously close to that of the protagonist Qiugu. The constant return to commentarial mode by the narrator does not so much invite the reader’s acceptance of the narrator’s value-judgements as point out that the narrator is making a judgement, and invite the reader to consider the validity of his view of events. A slight but dened distance between the narrator and his narrating of events allows the reader to see the two as distinct and to read against his version, constructing a running commentary on the narrator’s commentary rather than reading the ‘story’ directly through his eyes. The numerous examples of self-referential commentary and other devices of explicit narration seen in Jiu wei gui belie Henry Zhao’s comments that “sometimes the narrator can unwittingly acquire a little characterisation, as can be seen in another example from The Nine-Tail Tortoise . . .”94 In one case, we are treated to the spectacle of the narrator laughing: “Reader, what would you say these things were that they could be so precious? Ha ha, in fact they were no other than . . .”95 The very limited characterisation that Zhao sees a “traditional non-participant semi-implicit narrator” could allow himself without overtaxing the narrative framework is deliberately exceeded in the novel, drawing attention to questions of narratorial authority. In continuing its enquiry into the nature of the text, the late Qing courtesan novel fully accepts that the text is a written product, but remains undecided as to who is penning the text, and whether that gure need be a consistent single individual. Works such as Jiu wei gui or Haishang hua liezhuan may have dispensed with the device of a written text falling miraculously into the hands of the editor/narrator, but remain unhappy about the relation between author, narrator and focalizer. Although the narrator in these later works has a more authoritative grasp of the timeline, his position as author/scribe of the narrated text

94 95

Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator, 58. Jiu wei gui, 113.

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is less clear. Narratorial ambiguity arises in Jiu wei gui during the prolonged diversion into the history of Qiu Ba and Lin Daiyu’s relationship, clearly framed at its outset as a description the narrator feels the reader requires in order to clarify the narrative thread. This break for the purposes of comprehension is curiously posited as a break in the act of writing: “Having come to this point [ lit. having spoken thus far], I [ lit. he who is writing the book] have temporarily to put down my brush and ink and elaborate in detail upon the circumstances of Lin Daiyu’s marriage and return . . . so as not to leave the reader with nothing to grasp onto, complaining that my leads are not clear.”96 The conjunction of the two verbs shuo to speak, tell and zuo to write highlights the confusion in narratorial role between the traditional simulated oral story-teller and a contemporary acceptance of the validity of the ctionality of the text with the narrator as scribe of that text. Elsewhere, this juxtaposition of oral and written is stark, as between the sixteenth and seventeenth hui: “all of these events will be transmitted in the next chapter, at this moment I shall just have to suspend my narration ( yan shuo) and continue with the main story of Jiu wei gui in the next chapter.” This emphasis on oral narration is overshadowed by reference in the rst line of the next chapter to the written narrative: “Moreover, in the last volume, Zhang Qiugu met . . .”97 If the narrator is, as attested in these passages, the one who pens the story, is he then the author? Zhao’s conguration that: “Narratologically, however, the ctional narrative text is a story told by the narrator but, ctionally, overheard and recorded by the author in some way”98 does not accord with the presentation here. Although in this case the one who is speaking and the one writing could be two distinct ‘people,’ elsewhere the narrator clearly uses zuoshude to refer to himself, fusing the functions of author (i.e. the one who writes the text) and narrator (a created character). In some senses, the middle-man narrator gure has been excised from the text, and a commenting author alone remains.99

96

Jiu wei gui, 122. Jiu wei gui, 95, 96. 98 Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator, 48. 99 Patrick Hanan takes this formulation further in his discussion of the restricted narrator of Wu Jianren’s Haishang youcan lu 海上游驂綠 (Adventures in Shanghai), where he writes that “It is clear that author and narrator are one and the same person, who is also to be equated with the commentator.” “Wu Jianren and the Narrator,” 578. While this would present as many difculties as it solves for the red-light narrators, Hanan signicantly links the pose to authority in the narrative, a deliberate replacement of the authoritative narratorial voice with those of unreliable characters. Once 97

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There is no reason to suppose, from the evidence in Jiu wei gui, that the one who is narrating the story is any other that he who is writing it down: we are left with a character who conates the two aspects of retelling and transmission, and assigns this function to himself. Although a voluble and visible reader remains in the text, the authoritative source for the narrative message is being wrested back from the created narrator to an author-narrator. Direct and covert references to other contemporary novels further problematise the ctional status of the later texts. At the most obvious level, one of the characters in Jiu wei gui compares himself in his experiences of life with Wei Chizhu in Wei Xiuren’s Huayue hen, as if that character were a real being.100 At a closer reading level, numerous intertextual borrowings from other courtesan novel drinking game scenes are evident. Fleeting references to Haishang fanhua meng and other courtesan novels are made, principally by Qiugu, one of the more erudite among the characters. In his long speech warning Fang Youyun against the pleasures of the brothel houses, Qiugu notes the romanticisation of past courtesans, arguing that the likes of Du Shiniang 杜十娘 and Huo Xiaoyu 霍小玉 are not only not seen these days, but are not even heard of. This (ctional) romantic past is assumed to have existed, placing the characters of Jiu wei gui in a ctional rather than historical tradition. In other instances the characters are represented as ‘real’ characters in a historical setting, interacting with the world around. When Qiugu’s friend proclaims himself the number one detractor of drinking games, Qiugu defends his circle of friends, arguing that they just composed couplets for their own enjoyment, unlike other pretentious people who ran straight to the newspapers with their compositions.101 This setting of characters in a real and veriable present simultaneously invites the reader to believe in the credibility of characters as historic players and to accept their ctionality. The case of Lin Daiyu is the most ready example in Jiu wei gui. External reality—the famous prostitute Daiyu’s marriage, husband’s name and other incidents in her life—would be

again, narratorial pose brings us back to textual authority, and to the heritage of the textual scholars. 100 Jiu wei gui, 41. 101 Jiu wei gui, 62. In the earlier novels, there are far fewer direct references to contemporary events, and even Haishang hua and Jiu wei gui are still very much ctional stories set in an ‘as if ’ real total frame. The red-light novels (perhaps because of subject matter?) do not present the admixture of ction and reportage that Hanan describes as a distinguishing mark of late Qing ction, but remain in a more self-contained world. See Hanan, “Wu Jianren and the Narrator,” 554.

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known or knowable to a contemporary readership, who are nevertheless presented with a ctional history of her life and asked to read it as referring to the historical Lin Daiyu. The vacillation between roles as speaker and scribe was the lesser of the two problems for authors of ction at the turn of the twentieth century. The conventionalised phrases at the beginnings and ends of chapters signifying oral narration such as “if you want to know what happens next listen to the next chapter” had begun to disappear from novels of all types. The ‘found narrative’ scenario offered one solution, creating a ready-made text whose narration was always effectively a re-telling, but which in itself created interesting new relationships of biography and authority. The narrator was both scribe and speaker —and not necessarily in the same person, leading to the confusions described above centred around the moment of transfer. He could also now stand in for the author, reading the author’s written text, or even in some form be the implied author, re-reading that text. If “who speaks?” is the fundamental question to be addressed by narratology, this is deliberately problematised in red-light works to produce a reading where the narratee at one level is intradiegetic—the author himself, listening to, or rereading, his own tale. We, the reader, follow this author in his reading, at the same time as the tale is narrated to us.102 By the 1900s, the writtenness of the text had been long established and the stumbled-upon text scenario could be discarded. There was, however, then as now, no easy solution for authors over the question of omniscience, even if an alignment of author with narrator offered a partial way out. The forays into rst person and particularly the restricted third-person viewpoint in the early twentieth century can be seen as a response to, and development of, the attempts of red-light and other nineteenth-century authors to nd ways of making feasible the transmission of both characters and text. 2.6

The Effects of Edition

Two brief examples, one regarding narrator and one author, sufce to show the effect that edition can have on the relationships between text and transmission described in this chapter. In construing the convoluted 102 This construction has been noted for other late Qing works: Hanan writes of the narrator of Wu Jianren’s Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu (The strange tale of the four guardian gods, courtesans of Shanghai), that “in fact, he is the reader:” “Wu Jianren and the Narrator,” 502.

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narrator, the reading of author is critical, and in trying to isolate author and narrator gures, the effect of edition becomes apparent. A reader may not make it as far as the narratorial guise of the opening chapter before being deected by an edition’s presentation of the author. To take Haishang hua liezhuan as an example: the 1926/1935 reprint Shanghai Yadong edition opens with a preface by Hu Shi, the very rst section of which presents a biography of the author. Hu writes that we know little of the self-styled Hua ye lian nong (Flowers Also Pity Me), but that Jiang Ruizao claims he is Han Ziyun (Han Bangqing) from Songjiang, who was cultivated and rened, good at Chinese chess, had an opium addiction, lodged in Shanghai for a long time, and once held the post of newspaper editor.103

By later editions, little of Hu Shi’s hesitation remains in certifying biographical details. Assuming readers in the 1920s glance at these opening pages of the novel they have just purchased, they may form an instant opinion on the cultural standing of the author, a sense perhaps of shady personal morals (an opium habit no longer quite so prevalent or acceptable in Republican China), and glean information about his occupation that may have suggested either commercial publishing and a failed literatus, or a trend-setting new-style ction writer. For Hu Shi, the main import and impact of Han’s novel is in its use of Wu dialect, paving the way for later novels in baihua, genuine vernacular, but the reader has already been alerted early in this preface to the gure behind the text. The Yadong edition, like various others, give lists of translations for frequently encountered Wu dialect words (or Han’s choice of character to represent those terms) ahead of the story proper. Since it is the characters whose speech requires ‘translating,’ the narratorial voice tending to standard Chinese, an effect of the glossary lists is to link the narrator to the author as a writing gure, distinguished from the spoken, narrated gures. Eileen Chang’s (Zhang Ailing) rendition of the novel, a two volume ‘translation’ entitled Haishang hua kai 海上花開 (Shanghai owers open) and Haishang hua luo 海上花落 (Shanghai owers fall),104 also published in a single volume as Haishang hua, reverses this

103 Han Bangqing, Haishang hua liezhuan (Shanghai: Shanghai Yadong, 1935), Hu Shi Preface 1. 104 Zhang Ailing, Haishang hua kai: guoyu Haishang hua liezhuan I (Shanghai owers open: a Mandarin version of Haishang hua liezhuan) (Taibei: Huangguan [1983] repr. 1995).

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by homogenising the language into standard Chinese, albeit leaving the descriptive sections in a more classical form. Chang’s partial English translation “Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai” goes one step further, both a translation and an abridgement which excises the narrator gure. The prologue, writes Chang—which introduces the narrator/author, and is actually part of the rst chapter—is “uncharacteristic” and “would bore foreign readers and put them off before they had even begun, and would only serve to mislead the student of Chinese literature looking for underlying myths and philosophies.”105 This is evidently not so for the student seeking to understand the role of the author vis-à-vis his text, however. Other editions display a textual ambivalence about the positioning of the author: the 1982 Renmin Wenxue edition places an inscription by Hua Ye Lian Nong as author at the front, dated 1894 and presumably originating in the rst full printed 64 hui edition of that year, and appends other material such as biographical notes on the author and dialect glosses to the end of the book; with illustrations from an early edition interspersed among the opening pages.106 The re-presented author interferes with the already complicated textual transmission of author and narrator. Dispensing with narratorial intrusions in the central framed story creates a more subtle relationship with the narratee, as the reader follows the narrator’s casting of events and is not constantly directed to a particular interpretation or brought up short with questions. The relatively marker-free narrative of Qinglou meng, with little compensatory description or reection in a modern edition, becomes a rather tedious string of action and dialogue. Conventionalised time markers (e.g. ‘The next day,’ ‘On the 17th’ as paragraph openers) become means of enlivening the narrative, re-inserting a narratorial consciousness to regain the reader’s interest, as well as ensuring linear continuity. Where commentary is retained within the text, as chapter prefaces and interlinear notes and exclamations, a very different reading process is created, and the

105 Eileen Chang, trans. “Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai,” in Liu Ts’un-yan, ed., Chinese Middlebrow Fiction, 95. A full version of Chang’s translation, revised and edited by Eva Hong, exists as Han Bangqing, The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai. Trans. Eileen Chang, rev. and ed. Eva Hung (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 106 Han Bangqing’s liyan, Reading Notes, also appear at the front. As the footnote points out, these short paragraphs of comment on narrative technique were originally split up and successively published in different editions of the journal, their spacing determined by advertising copy and such. In each printed edition I have seen they are gathered into one continuous comment, as considered reection rather than snippets of wisdom pertinent to a particular chapter.

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absence of a commentating narrator is more than offset by constant intrusions and comments. A modern text which re-inserts the commentary of Zou Tao in a smaller font, such as the 1980 Renmin edition, is overshadowed by the reading consciousness of the commentator. In the early blockprinted or lithograph text, the comments were mainly in superscript form, not spliced into the main body of text. In these texts, the narrator is ever followed, analysed and criticized. Even a stripped, commentary-less text can re-insert a narratorial consciousness through paragraph breaks and typographical forms, an effect particularly associated with modern editions of the red-light novels. While the narrator succumbs less than the author to changes across a chronological series of editions, the format of the modern texts has still rendered him a relatively anachronistic gure. In a modern edition, the narrator stands out prominently from the text through the arrangement of paragraphs and sentence breaks. In the Shanghai Guji edition, for example, these wherever possible are formed from time shifts, beginning with ‘The next day’ etc., or transitions between characters as the focus of action, reecting back to the narrator’s control of description. In a more heavily biographical text, where the connections between author and text have been developed in a foreword or analysis of the novel, emphasis is placed on the position of the narrator as a commentator on the author, as authorial self-commentary and as an eyewitness to events in a life similar to that of the known author. Where authorial prefaces and the colophons of friends and contemporary critics are not published alongside the main story-text, the mediating role of the narrator between author and reader is also more prominent than where these were present. Without direct authorial input in the form of a preface and comment on his text, the voice of the narrator within the novel is more likely to be identied as that of the (biographical) author. 2.7

Conclusions

The narrator represents the consciousness of the author of the transmission of the physical text, and of the thoughts of the author. The status of the text—as the dictated words of the author, as the inscription of the narration, or as ctive pre-narrated story—is closely bound up with him. In the narrator the crossover between textuality and ctionality is most acutely explored: he is both the agent of transmission of the ‘real’ physical text, a copy of which the reader holds, and the one who narrates the ctional story contained within. The closeness of the reader’s

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copy to the text from which the narrator reads is itself a ction, part of the build-up of levels of ction through which a story is read. The narrator functions as one of a series of frames through which the courtesan novel is read. In Fengyue meng, Qinglou meng, Huayue hen and Haishang hua liezhuan, the narrator in the rst and/or last chapter meets an authorgure who is purportedly the creator and implied subject of the central chapters, the main ‘story;’ and in Fengyue meng, Qinglou meng, and Huayue hen, the narrator is handed or receives a copy of a text which is identical in name to that of the novel narrated. The systematic use of such frames in nineteenth-century works draws attention to the metacommunicative message of the courtesan ction, and taken with the range of other techniques used to signal the ctional status of a novel and the reading process itself, signies not simply a distancing of the author from his text, but a deliberate puzzle of identity. The courtesan texts are notable for the attention they pay to their own encoding and reception processes, and the lengths to which they go to write an awareness of this into the narrative. Means of overcoming the problem of the materiality of the text within the text include fabulous tales of miraculous appearances of the written product. Narrative is often presented as an act of concealing the means of transmission and of rendering transparent the objective story, yet this is shown to be impossible. In most of the six works under study the means of transmission of the text is foregrounded, becoming focal to a reading of the novel, and at this level the novels stand as a metactional reection on the purpose and means of writing. This has been viewed as a proactive stance against an anticipated backlash of critical opinion on supposedly debased works, but also ties in with wider developments in the presentation of ction in the late Qing. While the most obvious ctional antecedent is the gure of the Stone in Honglou meng, the development of new printing and distribution processes towards the end of the nineteenth century recast questions of textual transmission. In linking questions of transmission to the status of the text as ction, the courtesan authors are situating their works in the centre of contemporary debates on the expansion and function of literature taken up by political activists in the 1890s. Exploration into the process of textual transmission within a text is one way to validate an illegitimate text. The courtesan texts are illegitimate in as much as their protagonists are non-scholars engaged in unworthy pursuits, and their texts depart from traditional notions of valid literature. Yet in the ludic framings and complex processes of nar-

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ratorial transmission, the authors are paradoxically offering a means by which their texts, and by extension themselves, may be seen as intellectually and morally worthwhile. The encoding of the text in the novel is used to broach questions surrounding the transmission in ction of the identity of the author. The second- and third-hand reception of the text of the novel distances the work and proclaims its dissociation from its author. At the same time as this jocular retreat through successive levels of frame, the author is re-inscribed in the gure of the narrator. This is far from a simple process of self-revelation and the complexities precisely warn against a direct reading of the author into the transmitter of his text. Different strategies used to elucidate the relationship of the narrator to his text—as owner, commentator, scribe—have been described, and the contradictions that combinations of these create in the internal transmission of the text shown. The diffuse and diverse narratorial voices of the later texts can be seen as a further means of detracting from a unied authorial voice. Debate on the transmission of the text imbricates the process of selfrevelation of the author; if the text is a ction, then the author’s life is also a ction. The frame creates two frames of reference, and immediately allows for dissonance between narrator and author, between the implied author and ‘real’ author’s views. The texts of the novels are shown to be mysterious, hidden objects, produced via subjective human agents in an ambiguous medium, at once both written and oral literature. Ambiguity in the relationship between narrator and author parallels that between autobiography and ction. If the text is ction, then the author portrayed within may also be ctional, and the values promoted by the text also a ction. The narrator serves both to bring us close to the consciousness of the author and to push us away from him. Tension in most courtesan novels lies in this contradiction between using the gure of the narrator as a projection of the aged or mature moral voice of the author and as the descriptive eyewitness of earlier events. The split voices that some of the novels develop, contained within the frame and story proper, demonstrate a developing awareness of the futility of any straightforward search for the author in his text, highlighted by the play on the name of narrator in those texts where he is given an identity. Belief in the viability and necessity of realistic narration leads the same authors to mask or excise the presence of this narrator in the central narrated story, that pre-narrated text written by the author. There is no direct correspondence between the presence or absence of an explicit narrator and the structuring of reality: in Pinhua

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baojian, for example, there is no named narrator, and this gure is mostly absent from the narrative, whereas in Jiu wei gui the unnamed narrator is constantly directing attention towards himself. Both can be seen as attempting to point to the reality of the narrated world, one by negation and one by creating a counter-reality through acknowledgement of the narrated ction. The various red-light authors employ diverse narrative voices in the central story sections of their novels. In their use of an absent narrator, novels such as Pinhua baojian challenge the notion of an ‘oppressive stability’ in narrative form throughout the nineteenth century lasting until the radical changes of the late Qing. The objective mode of narration which was trialled and then developed in the 1890s and 1900s was esteemed by various contemporary critics.107 Surface adherence to traditional features of narrative, such as a resonance or echo between beginning and end—that “minimal demand for unity made by Chinese critics”108—should not mislead: many such narrative practices are present, but negated or subverted in their use within the novels. In the person of the narrator the notion of the courtesan novel as a generic entity begins to break down. Far from imposing a generic unity, the many voices of courtesan novel narrators serve as the focal point of an individual narrative creativity writing each text. This is not to say that there are no similarities or common threads: many of the authors, as seen, develop a variation of Honglou meng’s ‘completed narrative falling into the hands of a second narrator’ pose, sometimes combined with an ‘old man writing memoirs to deter errant youth’ guise. The co-ordinates of the narrator are tied to those of author and text. The intricate linkages between these three ensure that the structure of the whole narrative is affected by the position of the narrator. Understanding these interrelations, as the next chapter explores, is crucial to other aspects of narrative creativity, such as characterisation.

107 Both David Rolston and Dolehelová-Velingerová quote Anon. in the rst edition of Xiaoshuo xiao hua praising characterization in the ‘show’ not ‘tell’ mode, like a mirror reection. (Dolehelová-Velingerová, The Chinese Novel, 62; Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 169.) 108 Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction, 264.

CHAPTER THREE

CHARACTERISATION IN CONTEXT The characters, the situation, which strike one as real will be those that touch and interest one most, but the measure of reality is very difcult to x. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” 1884.

There are surprisingly few works devoted to characterisation in traditional Chinese ction. At rst this seems strange: surely characters are the point to a novel, the means by which ction takes esh, coming alive and remaining in the mind of the reader, their trajectory of discovery or self-discovery ours too, as we read, listen and imagine? And isn’t the raison d’être of a literary critic to elucidate the gamut of structural tricks by which this happens, and comment on any links to extra-textual social reality that give further insight into those processes? While there has been relatively little written on ‘characterisation’ in late imperial ction, there has been much on bipolarities of yin and yang, on puns and naming, on viragos, action heroes and other character types, on symbolism and poetic self-expression, and essays on paradoxes of character and ambiguous characters. What the lack of specic studies of character begins to point to is the lack of the individuated subject in traditional ction.1 Characters do not, in general, do what those raised on literary critical techniques derived from western nineteenthcentury realist novels expect them to do. These are very different from the novels of a Balzac or Flaubert where the world is envisioned and created through the hero, and interest lies primarily in the journey of development as this gure interacts with society and self. The very term characterisation might be misleading in this context. Red-light novels are full of characters, but their very multitude is itself suggestive. What we mean in a loose sense by characterisation—the development of a ‘person,’ how words describe a character to make that person

1 Cf. James A. Fujii’s study Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), Preface and Introduction, where he outlines the limits of reading Japanese literature of the Meiji era in terms of western realist/positivist subjectivism.

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seem life-like, or credible, how verisimilitude is created throughout the narrative—might not serve so well as a description of character function in traditional Chinese ction. Characterisation in vernacular ction has been formed to a high degree by two spheres of inuence: morality and textuality—and by a textual morality the subtlety of whose differences from real life can easily be lost. Both morality and textuality act to privilege the axis between reader and author/narrator, and de-emphasise direct links between reader and characters. Expectations of a morally-framed universe, with characters whose life histories conform to its prevailing rules, are still a strong force for red-light ction, even though the confounding of expectations may be an author’s aim. The theme of retribution, for example, so evident in earlier generations of the vernacular story, shapes expectations of how a story should be formed: characters accord to the idealised moral universe of ction, rather than the vagaries of life. Given the reading history of Chinese narrative and the presence of an often highly didactic preface in red-light works, it is difcult not to read characters as tools of the author’s moralising function. Authors might work against the grain of this in their stories, and few would credit that the real aim of a work of red-light ction was to warn others to avoid the path of its protagonist, pace the preface, but expectations of such a reading scheme modify how characters are approached. ‘Textuality,’ in terms of characterisation, refers to aspects of narration that point to the text itself, including the intrusion of the narrator and commentator, as well as textual insertions such as poetry: elements which direct the reader to the process of literary creation, and away from suspended belief in the world of the story-text. We are not expected to read characters in Qing ction through our own interpretive lens, as if with unmediated access to the character and her thoughts, nor are we encouraged to do so. The traditional ‘accompanied reading’ frame for traditional Chinese ction2 privileges not the reader-character axis, but a complicity between reader and implied author, mediated by the voice of the narrator. As critics have noted, the role of the reader is prominent in the reading frame of Chinese literature. Writing of Jin Ping Mei, Katherine Carlitz notes how “we are supposed to stand 2 See my discussion of this with regard to the novel Huayue hen in “Narrating the Passage of Text: Reading Multiple Editions of the Nineteenth-century novel Huayue Hen (Traces of Flowers and the Moon),” in Daria Berg, ed., Reading China (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 111–166.

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apart” with the author, joining in his songs of fury at events, and how through “‘unrealistic’ interventions, the author strengthens his private bond with us” to stand with him, outside the narrative.3 This “private bond” between reader and author is raised in each self-referential act to the text or its creator. The textuality of a narrative affects a reading of character in many ways, and this chapter needs reading in conjunction with the previous on narration, and the following on the structuring of red-light texts. Poetry, for example, can be vocalised as the self-expression of a character,4 but even where poetry voices the inner thoughts of a character, an echo is heard of the author, or editor who anthologised the poem in its original setting—and of their relationship with the reader, re-creating the poem in its new context. Reading is a working out of what is being said of a character in the verse and comment describing him or her, making inferences from intertextual references, drawing on the reader’s own memory bank of quotations. Like the riddles and puns which ll a novel like Fengyue meng, whose ‘cleverness’ is a game between author and reader, the insertion of already-textualised material points to the creator, and to his relationship with the reader. The highly structured narratives of lengthy vernacular ction, with their numerological and symbolic reading schemes, require a tting together of characters in their symbolic universes (whether of ower names, numbers, seasons, or whatever). The commentary tradition in traditional ction, with comments on individual phrases or sentences tted above the text box or as an interlineal note, strengthens the axis of comprehension between commentator and reader and downplays what is expected to be perceived or learnt from characters directly by a reader.5 No contemporary human could stand being so textually over-determined as characters in Qing novels.6

3

K. Carlitz, The Rhetoric of Chin p’ing mei (Bloomington, IN: Indiana, 1986), 87, 89. Cf. David Tod Roy’s discussion of the two main types of poetry in Jin Ping Mei, one of which is for self-expression, in “Songs of the Self: Self-expression through Song Lyrics in Jin Ping Mei,” in Halfor Eifring, ed., Minds and Mentalities in Traditional Chinese Literature (Beijing: Culture and Art Publishing House, 1999). 5 Critics have written of the multidimensional nature of characters in Jin Ping Mei, a layering built up through page after page of song and poem excerpts, through which characters speak and are spoken. While witty and illuminative, such narrative density points to the rational mind of the author, and does not necessarily build up to a coherent picture of a thinking, self-determining human subject. 6 That the characters strike us as ctive, constructed beings might demonstrate more about our relative illiteracy than Qing notions of characterisation: Chinese scholars, 4

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The relation between textuality and the author shifted signicantly towards the last decade of the nineteenth century, as writers began to explore narrative scenarios which had the effect of deconstructing traditional characterisation. As authors like Han Bangqing (Haishang hua liezhuan) or Zhang Chunfan ( Jiu wei gui) experimented with discarding the explicit narrator-commentator and the rich textuality of poetry and intertextual references, to focus on dialogue and direct description, characterisation itself became much more important. How novels were read had to undergo a compensatory shift. In its emphasis on textuality and the prominent role of the narrator, traditional Chinese ction saw characterisation as the outcome of an engagement between reader and author/narrator; a dialogic position to be negotiated rather than a human to be characterised and responded to; in the new narrative modes characters were given leeway to represent their own subjectivity more directly to the reader. An overemphasis on the role of the narrator in critical studies has underplayed the signicance of these changes for characterisation in ction. 3.1

Reading Red-light Characters: Textured and Gendered Relationships

If the mental image of a red-light ction hero is the conquering womaniser, nineteenth-century novels soon displace or downplay the stereotype. While the genteel polygamist still appears, the thwarted lover and anti-hero is as common as the caizi model. Financially astute and deceiving women compete with bitter and beleaguered clients for narratorial attention. Garden parties and hosted dinners allow for group gaiety, but a darker side to the women’s lives is rarely far from the surface, even in the so-called romantic works, and men repeatedly bring suffering on themselves through their relationships. Erotic description is rare in novels across the nineteenth century: for ction which is predicated on the brothel-inhabiting self, the characterisation of sexuality is noticeably low-key. Given the nature of characterisation, few memorable characters populate the works, and pathos is not a prime narrative force. Characters take on form through form: in their

who could recite the entire classics, nish each other’s sentences with quotations, and compose rhyming couplets in the style of a chosen author while seven parts drunk, were much more textualised beings, reading themselves through and in literary references, than those of us in an information-rich, memory-poor era.

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interactions with each other and in textual features such as poetry, rather than in reective musings or notable actions. Like the sexual excess of the brothels, textual excess is a dening feature of red-light works. Elements which feed into characterisation drawn from earlier stories include lovesickness and longing (highlights in Tang poetry); the theme of qing (Ming literary and philosophical sources); ranking of women (vernacular short stories); heroic suitors and bright women (caizi jiaren novellas) and plays on truth and falsity (Honglou meng), to list some of the more obvious. Unsurprisingly, the list of critical discourses which speak to characterisation in red-light ction is correspondingly catholic: duty and moral heroism, desire, the late imperial notion of self, the poetics of gender, and Confucian orthodoxy, as well as specic character types such as the shrew or polygamist.7 A study of characterisation in red-light ction could take any of these and expound the parallels, echoes and twists that courtesan and client add to the ongoing tradition. There are many correspondences, for example, between the discourse of ‘duty and moral heroism’ at the very end of the Ming and novels from the last days of the Qing, but whereas concern for the fate of China provoked Ming loyalists to promote moral regeneration, in red-light novels the warnings and exhortations of the prefaces are subverted by an overwhelming disengagement with political processes by characters. Disengagement is a key note in the harmonics of red-light works: characters who are not selected for state service and opt out of family structures inevitably struggle with social identity. A streak of anti-heroism imbues late Qing ctional heroes: the novel Huayue hen pairs the caizi hero, with his martial prowess and marital bliss, alongside the disengaged, despondent anti-hero who represents more the marginalisation thesis of the nineteenth-century novelist.

7 To give a single example of each: Patrick Hanan, “The Fiction of Moral Duty: The Vernacular Story in the 1640s,” in Hegel, Robert E., and Richard C. Hessney, eds., Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Martin W. Huang, Literati and Self Re/Presentation: Autobiographical Sensibilities in the Eighteenth Century Chinese Novel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Huang, Desire; Maram Epstein, Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity and Engendered Meanings in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001); Hegel, “Unpredictability and Meaning in Ming-Qing Literati Novels,” in Eva Hung, ed., Paradoxes of Traditional Chinese Literature; Keith McMahon, Misers, Shrews and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth Century Chinese Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Yenna Wu, The Chinese Virago: A Literary Theme (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

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Red-light ction excels at a playful criss-crossing of literary themes. If caizi jiaren and knight-errant tales liberate their protagonists from family structures and allow them to choose between lovers and sworn brothers,8 Fengyue meng allows its liberated/disengaged characters both love and brotherhood. The novel Qinglou meng attempts to combine the lial piety and state service of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy with the romanticism of the late Ming cult of sentiment, by subsuming both under a discourse on qing. Strategies for the containment of women vacillate within a traditional bifurcated discourse on woman as delicate beauty (predominantly in mid-century novels) or as rabid shrew (seen in some of the women of Haishang hua liezhuan and Jiu wei gui), and compete against newer ideologies of sympathetic engagement with women, both as a genuinely empathetic siding with women, and as ventriloquised pity for subordinated males. A study of characterisation is necessarily as wide as its inuences.9 If the literary record points to multiple and competing sources for courtesan characterisation, the historical record shows that authors entered into contemporary debates as well as literary-historical ones. The complex question of the representation of the women of late Qing texts has been highlighted in a series of recent studies looking at gender, opium, legal status, desire and fashion. Discourse on the subordinate status of women in Qing China as “extensions and servants of men” is well-known and may be taken as sub-text to debates.10 Thematic studies have provided the social and cultural embossment to the literary courtesan, in readings of the gender negotiations of these extra-familial women, of legal reforms on prostitution and the status differentials that stratied Qing society, of the effects of new dress codes on identity and social order, of the phallicised power that opium brought to female users, and of lingering traces of Ming representations of desire. Alongside

8

Epstein, Competing Discourses, 230. Even, for example, in a novel whose “artistic defects” include “a wooden narrative, at characters, tedious descriptions of parties and wine games, predictable melodramatic sequences,” as one leading critic has described Pinhua baojian, the tracing of inuences still takes us through the “idealised scholar-courtesan love story,” “the grand ‘sentimental-erotic tradition,’ ” and “talent and beauty ction;” with added discourses of qing, thwarted desire and delayed gratication, as well as xiqu 戲曲 theatre inuences in characterisation (author Chen Sen was also a dramatist), and manifold debt to Honglou meng. 10 Paul Ropp, Dissent in Early Modern China: Ju-lin wai-shih and Ch’ing Social Criticism (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1981), 121. 9

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more wide-ranging historical studies of the courtesan in the nineteenth century, we see the women as smoking partners, as soul-mates, or as criminals, and can add to this recent discourses on women as suicide or aspirant genteel.11 Voices calling for reform, or attacking systems of footbinding, concubinage, widow chastity or a lack of women’s education were heard sporadically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,12 and more insistently by the heyday of the red-light novel. The representation of courtesans is challenging because of their particular status as object and symbol, woman and not-woman. To consider the literary representation of courtesans in male-authored novels is yet more problematic because of the layer of subjectivity and self-conscious distancing in writing. In studying the ready-made, already-represented women and men in ction, interest lies in how characters are formed and created within the text. The focus of this chapter is a reading of relationships and how these are written into the novels: the alliances of client and courtesan, and of groups of men and sororities of women, of relationships with family, pimps and madams. The framework of relationships provides a way of combining detailed literary analysis of textual form (in characters’ relationships with text, author and reader) with overall patterns of meaning in the novels, red-light ction being predicated on human relationships in all their physical, spiritual and moral complexity. Relationships allow us to track the movements of characters across a novel, the splits and convergences which characterise brothel life; they also provide the focus of self-analysis for brothel

11 On gender see for example, Ellen Widmer, “Inecting Gender;” Keith McMahon, “Sublime love and the Ethics of Equality in a Homoerotic Novel of the Nineteenth Century: Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses,” Nan nü, 4.2: 70–109. On status see e.g. Mann, Precious Records; Matthew Sommer, Sex, Law and Society in Late Imperial China. On clothing see e.g. Paola Zamperini, “On Their Dress they Wore a Body: Fashion and Identity in Late Qing Shanghai,” positions: east asia cultures critique 11.2: 301–330 (Fall 2003). On opium see e.g. Keith McMahon “Opium and Sexuality in Late Qing Fiction,” Nan nü 2.1: 129–179; Keith McMahon, The Fall of the God of Money: Opium Smoking in Nineteenth-Century China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleeld, 2002), Chapter 6. From the huge numbers of studies of qing, the most extensive single volume is Huang, Desire. Notable historical studies include Gail Hershatter’s Dangerous Pleasures and Christian Henriot’s Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai. On suicide see special issue of Nan nü 3.1; on courtesan as aspirant genteel see Starr, “The Aspirant Genteel: Courtesan and Client in Qing Fiction” in Berg and Starr, eds., China and the Quest for Gentility, forthcoming. 12 With e.g. Yuan Mei, Ji Yun and Dai Zhen, and in ction Wu Jingzi, taking up the earlier challenges of ction writers Li Zhi, Shen Fu, Pu Songling and Li Yu. See further Ropp, Dissent in Early Modern China.

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inhabitants and the source of the angst and joys that propelled their authors to take up the brush and inscribe their traces. Prostitution is a fundamentally relational activity, and one which sets up a series of textual relationships when written into literature. Relationships between client and courtesan, client and self-image, character and author are all evoked. Through relationships personalities are formed, and through nodes of networks, the society of the novel takes shape. The failure of relationships as a theme cuts through the half century of writing in the works studied here.13 Beginning with the ‘truth’ of the brothel as dream or myth, broken and aborted relationships can be read in a range of ways: as comment on individuals caught up in difcult circumstances, as a sympathetic reading of the lives of socially marginalised women, or as a critique of late Qing society and the disintegration of traditional relationships. The subversive aspects of red-light ction soon intrude into a discussion of relationships. Are authors attempting to inscribe themselves into the reproducing text of literary immortality through their characters, or parodying that notion, negating and mocking the concept through their choice of heroines and heroes? Or imagining themselves as heirs to an earlier ideal, able to consort with courtesans with impunity, or cocking a snook at ofcialdom from their sanction-immune status as lower-level functionaries, parading their freedom to while away time in brothels? Do the novels laud a social system which separates out lover and wife into distinct persons, and endorse the delights this brings to males, or is theirs a more radical message in its rejection of the poverty and strain that concubinage and prostitution bring to relationships for both sexes? Much of this chapter is devoted to considering how characters speak out from the text, but another aspect derives from the entextualising process itself: the relationship between body and text, and between the bodies depicted and late Qing print culture. The red-light ction studied here derives more from Honglou meng than Jin Ping Mei: there is little graphic sex (with exceptions) and the works are mainly chaste.14

13 Viewed from the standpoint of relationships, little difference emerges between the red-light works which have been labelled ‘romantic’ and those labelled ‘realistic:’ the poverty of relationships is common to both. For discussion of the ‘two types’ of red-light novel, see Chapter Four below. 14 Martin Huang writes: “It is probably no exaggeration to say that since the appearance of Jin Ping Mei, every writer of ction focusing on the quotidian world and especially on the issue of desire has had to come to grips with the problem of how far to go in being graphic and explicit in describing passions and desires.” (Desire, 142.) That

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Sexual descriptions are more rare even than nancial transactions, and textually the works promote a clad elegance—until very recent editions, illustrations have been most coy. Theories of the female body as text have surfaced both in literary and legal studies of Qing women, but explorations of print as a sexual metaphor are perhaps better developed in western writings, and the light they shed on courtesans in ction at a time when pictorial representations of the female body became practically ubiquitous in journalistic print has yet to be fully gleaned.15 While characters display varying levels of self-awareness in their relationships, they are usually unaware that they inhabit a text, unlike the narrator.16 Characters are written into the novel by diverse means, occupy varying proportions of text, and appeal to readers in sundry ways. Not cognizant of their own textual existence, they rarely present themselves directly to a reader. The depiction of character which does occur in the various voices of author and narrator, through poetry, dream and ornament, operates in the context of structured meetings between characters. How the novels structure the macrolevel meetings of characters—in same-sex and mixed groups, between individuals—provides a convenient means of analysing relationships in the works. One model, that of Qinglou meng, is of a central male and a bevy of women. Variant patterns of group interaction range from the two parallel pairs of lovers in Huayue hen, to the gathering of friends and their actor-lovers in Pinhua baojian, or the endless series of bilateral couplings in Jiu wei gui. Three novels are presented below as case studies:

the authors of red-light ction should, by and large, choose not to follow the graphic mode presents the curiosity of the lascivious woman and the chaste text: readership expectations and generic patterns combine with potential censorship issues. 15 From the late Renaissance, male wags and poets in England were musing on the nature of paper as female, and writing as sexual domination by the male. The procreative pen of the male writer met a fear of emasculation when wielded by a woman. Printing endless copies of typed page was seen as an “image of patriarchally legitimized procreation,” with woman represented both as printing press and the pressed sheet of paper, the text over which male has copyright. Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 152. The press was a woman in continual labour, the printed copy a form of marital delity that the manuscript, inscribed by many hands, could only hope for. In this schema, red-light ction was more appropriate to manuscript circulation, that “seductively untrustworthy medium” that the texts enjoyed during their authors’ lifetimes. By the 1890s chaste depictions of sex emerge in a chaste textual form, and new paradoxes arise in the production of the courtesan novel. On illustrated courtesan novels, see Yeh, Shanghai Love. 16 With the occasional exception: see the end of Jiu wei gui, 913, where the character Qiugu speaks of his anticipated forthcoming narration into a text.

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the extreme romanticist one of Qinglou meng, the highly structured pair and group arrangements of Fengyue meng, and the distinct case of Haishang hua liezhuan, where character is developed almost exclusively through dialogue. There are few deeply memorable protagonists across the novels, whose names would conjure by metonymy or synecdoche the novel itself. The lesson of the mid nineteenth-century novel is that character is to be read as part of plot and in apposition to other characters, as stylised biography, not living portrait. Variations on this theme, and the beginnings of a movement against it, can be seen in the three works selected. 3.2

The Essential Male: Qinglou meng

The course of Qinglou meng describes the life of Jin Yixiang 金挹香, his forays from the scholar’s study into local Suzhou brothels, gradual entwining with numerous beauties and congregation of a harem of thirty-six ‘owers,’ and his later successes as an ofcial and family man. From his early days testing out the proposition that committed love could be found in the brothel setting with his youthful friends Zou Bailin 鄒拜林 and Ye Zhongying 葉仲英, to his purchase of rank and appointment to a position of governance in Hangzhou, and onwards to the examination successes of his three sons at jinshi level, Jin’s life seems charmed. Like Baoyu in Honglou meng, he is aware through dreams and visions of supernatural guidance in his search for true love, and of supramundane destiny: Jin eventually sees through the dust of the human world and departs for the ranks of the immortals, his earthly household of beauties scattered, to be reunited in heaven in the penultimate chapter of the novel. Jin Yixiang’s life follows remarkably closely the six stages of the “Romantic Route through Life” that Perry Link identies as a common pattern in love stories of the 1910s,17 but unlike Link’s model, and the protagonists of other red-light novels, there is no

17 Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butteries (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), 65. The “new composite myth” Link describes is pregured in the courtesan novel and points to one of the later outworkings of Qing prostitute ction. The six deterministically linked stages of the Romantic Route are: 1) Extraordinary inborn gifts 2) Supersensitivity—especially the over-emotional condition that Jin suffers 3) Falling in love 4) Cruel fate 5) Worry and disease 6) Destruction—which may be death or ight to religious seclusion. The cyclic nature and sense of completeness are fully evident in Qinglou meng.

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pronounced decline in the physical health or status of Jin himself after his youthful excesses of pleasure. Decline in Qinglou meng is embodied in the lives of Jin’s courtesans and reected in his mental well-being. Marriage for Jin marks a turning-point in social status and legitimacy, the beginning of a re-Confucianisation of values whose repercussions will profoundly affect the lives of the younger generation of children. It also marks a changing relationship with the beauties, the beginning of a painful process of separation, punctuated by their marriages to others or deaths. A re-establishment of Confucian values is common to the concluding chapters of several red-light novels, notably in the case of the courtesan Shuanglin 雙林 in Fengyue meng, adopting the manners and mores of a good Confucian wife after her marriage to Yuan You 袁猷, or the sexual normalisations and marriages that provide a nale to Pinhua baojian. In Qinglou meng, the dissolution of Jin’s multiple marriages and unions points to an even higher salvic path, his awakening to a post-sexual world, a regained primordial innocence. 3.2.1

Text

If the description so far has provoked a raised eyebrow of incredulity— and Jin does appear at the outset an odious individual, who has set himself the clinical task of testing women’s capacity to resemble idealised Ming literary courtesans—an alternative reading opens up, predicated on the self-reexive textuality of the novel, an awareness of its inscribedness as yet one more literary work on courtesans, playing with that tradition. Qinglou meng is a particularly ‘chatty’ work: the noise of the narrator and of the text constantly impose on the reading process, and this ‘thick’ textual condition informs our reading of character. The ourish of rhetorical verbiage throughout Qinglou meng does more than point to the text as text: it is the text. The narrator interrupts. The narrative is structured around transposed markers of traditional oral narration (“If you want to know what happens later, listen to the next instalment;” “Reader, what do you think?;” “These are not just unfounded statements by the author;” etc.). Characters speak poetry. Sayings, poetic couplets and regulated verse, lled with traditional images of romantic love and aesthetic pleasure, appear in practically every chapter to describe or express character. Poetic language, and the altered pattern of the text on the page that verse presents, manifests textual redundancy and excess, turning the reader back towards the process of reading, and to an examination of how character

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is formed through elusive and ambiguous images. A materialist reading hermeneutic is required to begin to explore character formation in a text which is so deliberate in its self-embodiment: as text (narrated through a mirror and in oneiric scenes), as author (appearing in person and by pseudonym), and as character (in borrowed and created voices). The overlap between narration and characterisation is seen clearly in the opening to Qinglou meng. Characterisation occurs through a lens: the reader does not form rst impressions of the protagonist Jin through his speech, actions or reections, but is introduced through the eyes of the narrator, Mu Zhen Shan Ren. The displaced autobiography that we are given—Mu Zhen Shan Ren is musing on his own boyhood, and comparing it to that of Jin—is further fractured by the prefaces the reader has just ploughed through, and by a second brief biography given by Jin. Following the opening poem of the rst chapter of Qinglou meng, Mu Zhen Shan Ren, the author/narrator/voice of the protagonist, notes: When I was young I too was shallow, and hated not being able to go to all the parties and entertainments. It was just that I formerly turned my back on passion and was always wary of the word ‘qing.’ Recently there has been a type of extravagant young man who loves sex and debauchery, who is arrogant and aunts his wealth . . . they recklessly brag how full of qing they are, but in fact do not know the true meaning of qing. They don’t understand that for people to have qing has required thousands of years of renement, the felicitous inuences of mountains and rivers, the alliance of ghosts and spirits, marvellous owers and strange plants, auspicious birds and lucky clouds, propitious tallies and omens, before such infatuated men and women are produced. Life brings death, death brings life. Where qing is concentrated, it is as if people are glued together and cannot be parted. So is this the reason that people of qing are rarely seen? Although I can explain for you now the gist of qing, and am steeped in it, yet I can only express a fraction of it. I was at a loose end that day I had nothing much to do, when I suddenly saw a Daoist arrive from outside. When I looked at him closely, he had a hoary head but a youthful face, like one who had transcended this world. I was just about to ask him why he had come, when he took out an ancient bronze mirror, and said: “The story of your entire life lies within this mirror, don’t ask questions—examine it and all will be clear.” After he had nished speaking he was gone.18

18 Qinglou meng, ( Jinan: Qilu Shushe, 1993), 1. References in this chapter are to this edition unless otherwise marked.

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The character of Jin that we are about to encounter throughout the novel is read through the re-narrating of Mu Zhen Shan Ren (whom we later discover shares a surname with the author), set in a moralising discourse ltered through memory, reected through the gaze of a mirror, and intellectualised as part of a wider discourse on qing. Any selfrevelation is to be tempered by this knowledge; the character presented can only ever be assessed in dialogue with the frame. The narrative continues within the mirror: ‘I’ feel myself melting into the scenery I see there, and see thirty-six beautiful women waiting around under thirty-six owering trees, and then watch them being dispatched to earth by a Daoist scribe. Another queasy sensation later, I’m on earth as a child. My character is then re-narrated, and I shift into autobiographical mode in the third person: “He grew up, was named Yixiang, travelled throughout the ower kingdoms, cherished beautiful women, passed exams, took higher exams, undertook ofcial posts, repaid the goodness of parents, kept friendships, took delight in music, supported sons and daughters, was friendly to neighbours, took my leave of vanity, sought to emulate the Dao, and spent more than twenty years in such affairs.” That the biographical sketch ts the events of Jin’s life as it unfolds (with a little more emphasis on the thirty-six lovers than suggested) removes any element of suspense in character narration: Jin is fully formed at the outset, and the reader knows the outline of his life and of the book. One of the early chapters of the novel demonstrates how an exaggerated textuality informs our reading of character. When Jin Yixiang rst becomes embroiled in the world of courtesans, his subconscious too succumbs, and the reader glimpses his psyche through the enticements he feels (“what you think about during the day, you dream about at night”, as the narrator points out)19 in a vivid dream sequence. Chapter Three opens with Jin Yixiang going to sleep early, after spending the previous night cavorting with the rst of the brothel girls he has taken to as part of his search for qing. He nds himself in a paradise of bright owers, willows, streams, and strange other-worldly objects. Asking a page boy, Jin is surprised to discover he is in the palace of Wu Gang, the man-inthe-moon who acts as earthly matchmaker. Passing through the rst room of his guided tour through the palace, dozens of dancing beauties who have left the red dust of the world and

19

Qinglou meng, 8.

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live in peaceful self-cultivation, jostle to view him. Moving on, he enters the ‘Room of Six Dynasties’ Beauties,’ where he is greeted with a clamour, “a gentleman of qing has come, quickly everyone, come and see.”20 With a tinkle of jade waist-ornaments, the amassed courtesans of China’s literary heritage emerge from behind their curtains. The rst beauty he asks about is Su Xiao[xiao] 蘇小小 of Qiantang, a famed poet-courtesan of the Six Dynasties. “I’ve admired your name for a long time,” Jin begins, and tells her how he has read of her intelligence, beauty and talent in Xihu zhi 西湖志 (Records of the Western Lake), and of how she supported Baoren (a penniless scholar whom, according to legend, Su supported nancially to sit the state examinations). “I regret that I was born so late in time, and could not prostrate myself before your ladyship,” he gushes, “I never expected to be able to meet you, this is truly extraordinary.”21 Fortunately, he is able to relate to her news of how, since her death at a tender age, countless other men of true qing have been bowled over by her.22 In a somewhat tactless parting word, he laments how sad it is that Baoren could not be there to meet her too, and how he was sure Baoren would knock his head to kowtow before her “as if pounding garlic.” Moving swiftly on to the next woman, Jin hears that she is Huqiu zhenniang 虎丘真娘 (The True Lady of Tiger Hill)—a famous beauty of Suzhou in the Tang.23 Again he prostrates himself, recounting how he has offered sacrices at her tomb, and how he took the characters Mu zhen (One who admires Truth) on her account: theirs must indeed be

20

Qinglou meng, 9. Qinglou meng, 9. 22 The subsequent record of writers on Su Xiaoxiao is impressive: poets Bo Juyi 白居易, Li Shangyin 李商隱, Wen Tingjun 溫庭筠 and Li He 李賀 all alluded to her, the latter writing a poem entitled “The tomb of Su Xiaoxiao.” Su herself, whose beloved Ruan Ji 阮籍 was taken from her by his parents, aghast at his choice of lover, was an accomplished entertainer and poet. En route to the ofcial position he had gained through her help, Baoren passed through her hometown and came across her funeral procession. Distraught, he set up a monument to her. Her legend carries on to this day with the tomb a tourist attraction, although some Hangzhou scholars are apparently less than impressed that the Mucai ting (Admiring Talent Pavilion), supposedly set up by Baoren over a millennium ago, has been renamed the Mocai ting (Touching Wealth Pavilion) by tourists throwing coins in a bid for blessings. 23 A leading prostitute of Suzhou during the Tang, Huqiu zhenniang (Hu Ruizhen, 胡瑞珍) was born into a high-class family but was separated from them when eeing the Anlushan troubles, and set herself up as a courtesan who sold her arts, not her body. According to legend, she refused a potential suitor Wang Yinxiang 王蔭祥 because her parents had already betrothed her; when he attempted to pay off her madam with a large bribe, she hanged herself to protect her chastity. Wang, heartbroken, donated a sum to bury her on Tiger Hill and set up a memorial stone, vowing not to marry. 21

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a heaven-ordained meeting. The reader has, by this point, noticed that Mu zhen is not Jin’s sobriquet, but that of the pseudonymous author of Qinglou meng, in a further intersection of text and reality. The courtesan, in return, replies that she knows of his love (qing) and that a new poem had appeared on her tomb: their meeting was truly the will of heaven. Jin then chats for some time, we are told, with Xue Tao 薛濤, Guan Panpan 關盼盼 and Ma Xianglan 馬湘蘭, before the page urges him onwards. Huqiu zhenniang adds her encouragement, telling Jin he would be foolish to miss the famous companions in store for him. Overcome with emotion, he leaves. The names of these beauties provide a resonant, chronological account of courtesans of a certain type: worthy women, women who were born into good homes lined with scholarly tomes, who due to political ight or parental death were abandoned young, and fell into the ‘green chambers’ out of destitution. Beautiful and talented in various arts, these women, etched into the literary imagination, entertained ofcials, rejected suitors, and showed great courage in their pursuit of solitude or suicide in maintaining purity or monogamy.24 The litany of historical exemplars reveals Jin’s subconscious (he is still dreaming) construct of the courtesan, and the typology of courtesan we are to expect in reading character in this work. These are not the prostitutes of whom Qing reformers were writing, whom charitable and Christian organisations in late Qing China were aiding, or whom governmental legislation was targeting. These are the extra-ordinary exemplary women of lore, the re-imagined heroines who have enthused generations of males searching for a pulchritudinous, educated soul-mate.25 Jin is rmly positioning his narrative in exotic Tang sensibilities and re-lived Ming idealism. Jin is also, equally importantly in 24 Xue Tao was an accomplished Tang poet who died around 835; one of her works is recorded in the Quan Tang Shi; a collected volume of verse is lost. A household of ofcials, the family ended up in the state of Shu after her father died, and she served as a high-class courtesan for ofcials, including Wei Gao 韋皋, who wanted her for his personal secretary. Guan Panpan, from the late eighth century, was also born into a scholarly household and was skilled in shi poetry. Wooed by countless young men, she was taken as a concubine by Zhang Yin 張愔 but was his favourite. After Zhang’s death, when his wives and other concubines were scattered, Guan remained chaste and alone in the Swallow Tower he had built for he. She was immortalised in verse by Bo Juyi, who had once enjoyed her charms at dinner. Ma Xianglan (1548–1604) was a Ming dynasty courtesan widely known as a painter and poet. 25 For an extended treatment of the theme of later generations of males admiring young girls as a marker of social belonging, see Paul Ropp, Banished Immortal: Searching for Shuangqing, China’s Peasant Woman Poet (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001).

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this context, setting out for the reader his own literary history of courtesan stories and tales, and deftly presenting his own view on the textual antecedents to Qinglou meng, and on the frame within which characters are to be read. If readers have failed to grasp the meta-narrational signicance of the dream, the stakes are raised considerably as Jin passes through the next winding corridor to the Division of Unfortunate Fates: a reference he recognises as referring to the dwelling of Lin Daiyu, heroine of Honglou meng. Having been introduced to Baochai, Qingwen and the rest of the cast, Jin sighs in wonder that the beauties are preserved in the elegance of their individual characters after death. Knocking at a vermilion door, he tells a servant that he has come to pay his respects to Xiaoxiangfeizi 瀟湘妃子 (a reference to Lin Daiyu from Chapter 37 of Honglou meng), and is admitted on account of his elegant speech and manners. To his humble introduction and prostrations, she murmurs: “I only knew that Jia Baoyu was infatuated with qing, who would have thought that this Jin was also like this.” That the greatest of literary heroines recognises his claims to qing is a wonderful afrmation of Jin’s textual ego. What follows is an extended satirical acknowledgement of the author’s obeisance to Honglou meng. “Please get up, Mr Jin,” urges Lin Daiyu. “It’s been over two hundred years since I left the world. The events of our lives were really not worth passing on to others. Mr Cao Xueqin fabricated (qu, 曲) a story from them, and although they are just a beautiful story about love and passion (chiqing, 痴情), I fear there is much to mislead people.” In response to this remarkable charge against her creator, Jin acknowledges his culpability in literary adulation: “How truly you have spoken. When I read The Story of the Stone [i.e. Honglou meng] I too burnt incense and kowtowed, and prostrated myself deeply. My friend Zou Bailin went even further and said that you were one of the greatest women of qing throughout history, and the wonderful thing was you never strayed into depravity. He admired you so much that he called himself ‘Unofcial Historian Bailin’ [worshipper of Lin].”26 Jin Yixiang then recites two quatrains that Bailin had composed for her, provoking an outburst of gratitude at their empathy, and regret at not being able to meet Bailin. Lo and behold, the door suddenly opens, and in walks Bailin. He and Daiyu are both

26 Qinglou meng, 10. This Zou has been readily identied with Zou Tao, the preface writer (and author of the red-light work Haishang chentian ying.)

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choked, tears streaming down. After Lin Daiyu disappears in a puff of wind, Jin and Zou enter the last room of the palace, taking a sneaky look in the Book of Fate at their own future wives’ surnames, and how many concubines they might have. Characters in novels, the passage suggests, are deliberately contorted in the process of writing, any vraisemblance lost during transmission. Characters come alive in dialogue with other literary gures. We cannot expect Jin Yixiang’s biography to be any more real or true, even to the vision seen in the mirror at the outset, than Daiyu’s manhandling by Cao Xueqin. If dialogue with Lin Daiyu blurs bounds between text and life, in the physical presence of a ctional heroine, a further example of characterisation shows how even ordinary interactions between characters in the novel are mediated through texts. As suggested, characters express themselves self-consciously in verse. In Chapter 13, the narrator has been explaining how Jin Yixiang gets away with lying to his parents about his nocturnal whereabouts because they dote on him, and because he is frequently out for evenings of literary gatherings and can use these as an excuse. Conned to his study for the morning, Yixiang’s thoughts circle around a girl he had met the previous day. He wants to send her a few verses, but is aware that the girl is reasonably well-educated and would look down on a few decadent Confucian poems, and that he ought to compose something fresh. While cogitating, his eye falls on an anthology, “Disbelieving Rain Collection,” from which he culls some verses and assembles them together. The four couplets that Yixiang sends to Aiqing 愛卿 are replete with references to the language of romantic association, to encounters by lamplight and under the inuence of alcohol, with recurring time-worn, gendered, images of lovesickness and drunkenness, jade and enchanting beauty. Characters express themselves in verse, but this is inevitably an idealised image of self, and it is left to the reader to determine the boundaries between character and delusion. In the following scene in Chapter 14, Yixiang and Aiqing have agreed to spend the evening together, and Yixiang sets out the rules for their poetic engagement, based on tonal patterns set by a random selection of ivory slips. The couple pledge to each other with ne wine, and Yixiang begins their versied dialogue. Aiqing is not particularly impressed with his rst offering, commenting that “although the poem is ne, it reveals its form and substance too obviously.” Moments later, she picks up a slip and gripes:

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chapter three “This tone is rather difcult to rhyme.” She sipped a cup of wine, thought a while, concentrating profoundly, then said “I’ve got it.” She read out what she had written: Living among the red chambers, never having a family; beautiful jade in a casket, without aw; The young girl grows up, gaining knowledge; clouds of dressed hair and blushing hair-clasp, at night the owers close. Yixiang listened, clapped his hands and praised it. “This verse is most excellent, highly fragrant and beautifully selected . . . but what is the reason for the night owers having a blushing hair-pin?” Aiqing’s face reddened and she pinched Yixiang. Yixiang responded: “Oh, I see, by ‘owers’ you were alluding to [that sort of ] coming together at night. Ha ha ha, what if tonight I substitute a stalk for your hair-pin?” Aiqing caught Yixiang and said “Xiang, you dare say that again! Seeing she had him in a tight grasp, he babbled ‘I shan’t, I shan’t! . . .27

Aiqing, and the reader, are aware of the biographical signicance of her verse long before her lover, verse demarcating the relative intelligence of the interlocutors. Poetry is a means of communication between couples as well as the mode for men to analyse and assess women, and in the composition of poetry, the process of composition of the text is alluded to—in this scene, through games, innuendo, and in the random patterns and selections of verse, which image the path of literary creation. Borrowed texts, whether poetry, common sayings, or references to works like Honglou meng lubricate relations between characters, whose lives are built up through these intertextual referents. The noise levels of the text are increased signicantly in an annotated edition. Zou Tao’s commentary edition of Qinglou meng, reproduced in one modern version, highlights the textuality of the novel further. After the opening poem, Zou points out for readers who may have missed the structural signicance (his interlineal commentary in italics and a smaller font size, in the 1990 Beijing Daxue edition): “Later it ends with a shi poem; here it begins with a ci poem.”28 A paragraph later Zou’s readers are alerted to the trope of qing running through the novel, and in his next comment, to the organisational thread of the work in its promotion of the absurd, or the paradox of illusion and truth. The commentator illuminates aspects of character too: on the following page, the symbolic meaning for Yixiang’s father’s character is given, and Zou expands the

27 28

Qinglou meng, 57. Qinglou meng (Beijing: Beijing Daxue, 1990), 2.

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brief opening description of Yixiang’s nature to stress to readers the importance of qing and cai (talent) in constructing character.29 3.2.2 Qing Qinglou meng might best be described as a one character novel: all plot strands and characterisation revolve around the inconsistent, wastrel gure of Jin. Jin Yixiang’s character, built up through his relationships with the many women of the novel, is frequently analysed by himself and others through the concept of qing: sentiments, feelings or love.30 Qing is focal to discussions and assessment of character, especially male, in all of the pre-1890s novels studied here, but particularly in the more optimistic romances.31 By the 1890s, qing loses its explanatory force when the zeitgeist has shifted to fashion, money and politics. Qing is love and an illness of excess, it ranges from nascent attraction to deep lust, is related to beauty, and is a redemptive quality. It is an excuse for character aws and a focus of admiration. Qing separates Yixiang from other men in the eyes of women (in his dreams, at least). While ‘excessive qing’ is the lust of youthful sexuality excited by the perfumes and visions of the brothel, by contrast, qing in women is almost exclusively a positive quality, denoting a seless generosity and care for others.32 A long history of writings on qing lters into red-light texts. This has been linked to self identity,33 but also to deeper philosophical discussions on nature (xing 性) and desire ( yu 欲/慾) and their appropriate 29

Qinglou meng (Beijing: Beijing Daxue, 1990), 4. For the most comprehensive overview of the history of usage of qing, including the links between qing and xing (nature), qing and death, see Huang, Desire, Chapter 2. 31 In Pinhua baojian, for example, the characters of the two main protagonists are also bound up with notions of qing. Qing is frequently evidenced in a delicate or highly-strung constitution: on two or three occasions where the protagonist Ziyu suffers separation from his boy-lover Qinyan 琴言 he falls into a fairly serious illness accompanied by delirium. A higher sensibility, including deeper appreciation of beauty and art, and the faculty to convert this into ne poetry, denote the possessor of qing, along with an ability to attain a deep level of intimacy with another. The inability of others to grasp why Ziyu becomes so ill demonstrates the axiom that only high characters may understand matters of deep qing. Clinical depression and a defeatist, fatalistic streak are features common to courtesan novel heroes imbued with more sensitive spirits. 32 A sympathetic reading of qing may occasionally present in the male case: Yixiang is praised for his ‘true qing’ for licking the pus from Aiqing’s eyes each morning when she suffers an eye illness (an identical episode appears in Fengyue meng), Qinglou meng, 64. 33 As Huang writes, “concepts like ‘genuine feelings’ were appropriated by disenchanted literati to reassert their elite status as scholars.” Huang, Desire, 40. This concept parallels the ‘comfort literature’ notion of courtesan writing, and both need thinking through further. 30

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expression. At various points over two millennia of literature qing was seen as a negative counterpoint to xing (nature), as a neutral state of mind, as a dubious state of aroused emotions, redened as a NeoConfucian virtue, linked to women’s sexual desire, and to death and chastity.34 By the late Ming, the term frequently referred to sexual love, and its aesthetic purity was compromised.35 This contradiction is nowhere more apparent than in works describing courtesans, where the appropriation of lofty sentiments, associated with a late Ming valorization of desire, in some texts met with the realities of nineteenth-century brothel life in others. One strategy of legitimizing qing was to emphasise its universal nature, but its use in courtesan-client relationships stretched this possibility. To counteract the use of qing as signalling sexual gratication in erotic literature, the early Qing caizi jiaren works had proclaimed qing as commitment, faithfulness and chastity, a heroic abstinence, and a concentration on higher sentiments shared by both sexes. Qing was restored as a virtue, especially among literati and those for whom it could stand for the values of friendship, loyalty, and at its height, the qualities of a soulmate (zhiji 知己). The strongest bond of qing was that which imitates the friendship between two literati males: informing the gendered model of love/friendship with the women of the novels. Those courtesan works such as Qinglou meng or Pinhua baojian which adopt the discourse of qing to describe characters are perversely drawing on a suffering, chaste and self-sacricing version of qing, and its more extreme expression where subject and object dissolve, and “the seless quest for a true friend for whom one is willing to give up one’s life turns into a narcissistic gesture of self-aggrandizement.”36 The narcissism of men of great qing reached its apotheosis in Jin Yixiang and in Ziyu 子玉 of Pinhua baojian. Qinglou meng deliberately draws on wide textual traditions of qing. As decline and desertion become prominent themes in the second half of

34

See Huang, Desire, esp. Chapters 1–2. As Huang writes, “in fact, the tension between the need to maintain the value of qing as a lofty sentiment and the pressures to use this same concept to justify physical desire became a central issue in many late Ming and early Qing works of drama and especially ction.” Huang, Desire, 43. A tendency by authors to idealise the conditions of the courtesan and tone down their increasing sexuality has been noted by several commentators on the nineteenth century; cf. Henriot’s comments describing which singing girls were not sexually available, Prostitution and Sexuality, 35. 36 Huang, Desire, 77. 35

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the novel, the downside of Yixiang’s excessive qing becomes apparent as he suffers depression and melancholy at the thought of his former happiness. Aiqing’s explanation for his grief, because he was “a person of much qing” renders ‘duo qing 多情’ as over-emotional, with attendant feminine connotations. Even his wives begin to lose pity and patience at his despondence, but his ‘great qing’ is precisely the quality that his ex-lovers remember most. When Yixiang claims to have rid himself of all qing, the Daoist monk-cum-mentor gure reappears and explains the six types of qing and how they reach full fruition in him. The outplay of emotions is clearly gendered: the women of Qinglou meng are perfectly able to regulate their qing. Aiqing waits two years before making a profession of her love, and takes an entirely more rational approach to life, a reversal of the emotive female versus calm male paradigm.37 Courtesans, outside the cloistered household, already occupy a male sphere: making decisions, taking responsibility, engaging in nancial transactions, and it is not surprising that emotional resilience should be represented as a character trait. While critics have pointed to opium effecting a gender reversal on users, noting its high level of use among late Qing courtesans, the client-courtesan relationship itself has a gender reordering effect.38 The reader of Qinglou meng is often given to sense a character’s feelings through a description of his mood, or through pathetic fallacy, but characterisation is not obviously coherent. Yixiang is difcult to characterise as some traits seem inconsistent: one moment he is imposing himself on helpless serving maids, the next he is philosophising about how many men love the outer woman without truly loving her inner being. Although Yixiang eventually sees through the vanity of his lifestyle, his basic character scarcely matures in the twenty years of the narrative. Such ‘at’ characters with no inner lives are partially a

37

Cf. e.g. Zamperini “but women, in much late imperial ction, are creatures governed by their often uncontrollable and indomitable qing.” “Eros and Suicide in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction,” Nan nü 3.1: 77–104 (2001), 87. 38 On the emasculation of men and phallicising of women, see McMahon, “Opium.” Aiqing in Qinglou meng certainly has access to opium, since her attempted suicide is by ingestion, but she is not a regular user, let alone addict. On the recreational use of opium in late Qing Shanghai, as a practice with varying dangers but no more socially problematic than gambling or prostitution, see Alexander Des Forges, “Opium/ Leisure/ Shanghai: Urban Economies of Consumption,” in Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds., Opium Regimes: China, Britain and Japan 1839–1952 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 168.

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response to an over-powering narrator. The predominance of mimetic presentation ensures character has to be analysed primarily through action: even the best-dened red-light characters tend towards the semiotic/purist pole of analysis, where they cannot be extrapolated from a given situation. 3.2.3

Honglou meng

While writings on qing presented centuries of literary feeding ground for red-light novelists, a third way in which characterisation in Qinglou meng can be seen to be both constrained and developed through texts is through extended references to Honglou meng. Just as sequels appeared to Honglou meng which became part of the reading history of that text, Qinglou meng plays on its afnities with its predecessor at various levels of resonance and of jovial irony. The supercial resemblance between Qinglou meng (Dream of green chambers) and Honglou meng (Dream of red chambers) extends well beyond the name and the substitution of a brothel for the Daguan garden. Commentators have not spared author Yu Da the negative aspects of such a comparison: “Naturally, its hopes of standing alongside Honglou meng were but a day-dream”39 wrote one critic, perhaps affronted at the idea that the revered work could be imitated. Lu Xun lists the xiaxie novels as works following in the tradition of happy-ending sequels to Honglou meng, but with the style and setting brought down closer to the lives of ordinary households.40 Borrowings and inuences in Qinglou meng are readily discernible in the characters of the two male protagonists and their relationships with surrounding females. Both Jia Baoyu and Jin Yixiang are central to the narratives, and conscious of their centrality to the lives of those around them, to the point of arrogance. Jia Baoyu had become such a standard measure of the cosseted young son, that all later depictions of love-torn adolescent males stand in relation to him. “Like the hero of the beautyscholar romance, Baoyu presumes that he is better than the rest of mankind and thus more deserving of female company,” writes McMahon in a depiction which is equally apt for Yixiang.41 Both wish to appropriate for

39

Wu Liquan, Zhongguo yanqing xiaoshuo shi, 339. Lu Xun, Zhongguo xiaoshuo, 339. Tao Muning also discerns a macro-resemblance, with the xiaxie novelists describing the ruins of the great families from the standpoint of an old-style literatus, while the author of Honglou meng looked forward prophetically to the fall of the hereditary families. Tao Muning, Qinglou wenxue yu Zhongguo wenhua, 216. 41 McMahon, Misers, Shrews and Polygamists, 121. 40

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themselves all of the women in their vicinity, and both are exceedingly unhappy about the prospect of ‘their’ women’s marriage to other men. In both novels the women are unswervingly loyal to the needs of the male ego. Baoyu’s wishes “that he and the women of the garden would never marry and would instead remain in a state of innocent intimacy”42 nd a sexualised but equally other-worldly counterpart in the naive desires of Yixiang to create and retain a harem of beautiful, contented, lovers. Yixiang’s frustrated search for a female soul-mate nds parallels in Baoyu’s plea that women do not understand him, and his ultimate resolution to the problem, ight, is identical. Both Baochai and Aiqing, Jin’s principal wife, are left as virtual widows when their husbands choose to nd their true selves, denying the world and becoming monks. For Louise Edwards, Baoyu’s decision to undergo metaphoric castration and become a monk conrms a vision of the feminine as “sexualised Other, as an obstacle to male spiritual freedom,”43 with female characters present only where they reect upon the male. Yixiang’s quest for spiritual liberation and its salvic function for women is clear, and in both novels women play a subsidiary role. The audience reads mostly of life in the women’s quarters, but the women’s fundamental purpose is to reect the male struggle enacted therein.44 In Qinglou meng the focus follows Yixiang wherever he travels: when he is not present, scenes are closed to the reader, a trait not limited to the more romantic red-light novels. Qinglou meng reiterates the centuries-old depiction of male awakening through spiritual understanding, or repentance and renunciation (of women), and female ‘awakening’ through death, or sublimation. Males, earthly or immortal, are able to transcend boundaries (in dreams, or even physically between existences) in a manner denied to females. 3.2.4

Female Roles

If Qinglou meng presents a particularly highly-textualised reading of character, it also provides an extreme example of disparity in gender relations among the courtesan novels. Many of the same elements of characterisation, such as the ranking of females in poetry according to beauty or talent, or the use of femininity as a foil for male characterisation,

42

McMahon, Misers, Shrews and Polygamists, 190. Louise P. Edwards, Men and Women in Qing China: Gender in The Red Chamber Dream (Leiden: Brill 1994), 48. 44 Edwards, Men and Women, 45. 43

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are shared with works such as Huayue hen or Pinhua baojian, but Qinglou meng is unusual in its numbers of cameo female roles.45 Most of the female characters of necessity accord to the typology of romance, where attributes of characters are few, and tightly coordinated for easy identication by the reader;46 they appear as variations on the theme of a woman, producing tokens and tears at appropriate points in the narrative. Those females who are described in greater depth provide a standard for determining the moral worth of the male protagonist, and the force for an alternate reading of the text. Yixiang’s constant claims to the uniqueness of his egalitarian treatment of women is undermined by the context of a single male surrounded by a circle of thirty doting women. The source of Yixiang’s angst in the second half of the novel stems partly from his inability to let go of the past, but more fundamentally from his unwillingness to view women as separate entities, able to take autonomous decisions and direct their own lives.47 Male insecurities that fed into and derived from gender rethinking in the nineteenth century are parodied in Yixiang, and the transposition of courtesan from talented beauty to money-pinching hag by the end of the nineteenth century can be read as an extreme reaction to the extreme vision of such protagonists. The problems of dissecting the lives of female characters in Qinglou meng are compounded for the reader by the unrelentingly male standpoint of the narrator (whether Yixiang or Yu, character-narrator or author-narrator), whose powers of divination extend even less to the female mind than the male. The construction of an alternate, female discourse is almost invited by the author: we are told, for instance, that when Zhuqing 竹卿, one of Yixiang’s favourite women, travels to see him, she is ‘delighted’ at news of his marriage to Aiqing, an incongruous response from a lovesick woman who might have presumed herself rst in his estimation.48 Some women depart from Yixiang through marriage, others through death. This latter group is able to seem sincere in their grief at parting, since they have not compromised the sentiments of the words by their stance. When Suzhi 素芝 cries out with her last 45 Its only rival in this among this group of novels is the lengthy cast-list of maids and serving girls to be classied by leisured males in Pinhua baojian. 46 Cf. Martin Price, Forms of Life: Character and Moral Imagination in the Novel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 24. 47 Yixiang’s bewilderment, for example, at the courtesan Lichun running off to a nunnery out of hatred for her life is symptomatic of this (Chapter 47). 48 Qinglou meng, 110.

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breath “Brother Xiang, I’m going,” he is justied in construing that she does so unwillingly. The tremendous power that Yixiang holds over these semi-attached women is evident; the tragedy lies not in Suzhi’s premature death but in her futile attachment to Yixiang.49 Those who desert Jin for marriage pepper their parting speeches with excuses, such as the need to nd a partner before one is old and decrepit (Xiuying 秀英), or one’s poor fate (Qiaoyun 巧雲). The reader is unable to tell whether the women do have any real choice: we know that those who speak of the life of a courtesan do so with detestation, and that marriage out was seen as a desirable escape route, and so sense an inauthenticity in their protestations at leaving.50 If we can assume that the women’s stated reasons for their desertions were given to reassure Yixiang and buff his self-esteem, then his determination to seek each woman out before she departs, and the subsequent tears that ensue as each mounts the bridal sedan are an act of staged selshness. This is not the surface reading of the text: the girls whose later histories are recounted mainly regret leaving their ‘duo qing’ lover, and the nal ( joyful) reunion in heaven is engineered through their ties with Yixiang, his world-view of an eternal union with each of them validated by the novel’s outcome. In their initial contact with males, the females are particularly selfdeprecatory, especially as regards intellectual ability, yet Aiqing is looked to as the arbiter of literary composition. A pronounced difference in register is occasionally apparent between the sexes denoting distinctions in status, Yixiang employing a rough vernacular and the courtesans replying in a servile acrolect of four character phrases.51 All but one or two of the courtesans in Qinglou meng can produce regulated classical poetry on demand.52 In contrast to other red-light novels, questions over

49

Qinglou meng, 194. Historical surveys suggest a reasonably high percentage escaped the trade through marriage or buying themselves out. Henriot is fairly blithe about the numbers marrying out, extrapolating from surveys and premising suppositions on the assumption that girls only worked for a few years. His data from the literatus Wang Tao suggest that around two-thirds married out (Prostitution and Sexuality, 59). Cf. Mann, Precious Records, 34, 13. 51 For discussion of language as an indicator of status and culture among the courtesan girls in late Qing ction, and particularly Jiu wei gui, see Chen Pingyuan, Xiaoshuo shi lunji (xia), 1426–7. 52 There are considerable grounds for questioning the closeness to reality of this ctional representation of the levels of literacy and education among the courtesans. Christian Henriot, in his article “Chinese Courtesans in Late Qing and Early Republican Shanghai 50

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the women’s means of subsistence, or the economics of their relationships with Yixiang and other clients, are omitted. The women’s attitudes towards their clients/lovers also receive scant treatment. What evidence there is suggests that they condone the multiple partners and philandering of the young males, regarding this as their ‘natural character.’ On the night Yixiang thanks his go-betweens for arranging his match with Aiqing, she arranges three women for the three friends. The lack of recorded dialogue between women in the narrative occludes from us the greater part of their life. Aiqing’s attempted suicide after a quarrel with her step-mother/ madam is one of the few indicators of dissent or despair in the novel and is quickly forgotten as life returns to its focus on pleasure gardens and poetry recitals. After her resuscitation, Aiqing questions the point, if she has to return to the ‘ery pit’ (huokeng 火坑) of life, a description that sits awkwardly alongside the pleasure-garden vision of the narrative, pointing again to the disparity between surface text and lived reality. Aiqing’s attempted suicide falls into the category of desperation, rather than the empowering death that commentators have described for some women choosing this option.53 A woman could regain honour with a good death, using it to proclaim her chastity or moral worth when scorned or mistreated, but vengeance was regarded as a ‘bad’ death motive. If male commentators saw virtue in the act, a woman could gain social standing from suicide, but Aiqing’s tempestuous action

(1849–1925),” East Asian History, 1994, 33–52 considers the question and argues from his “very fragmentary sources” (p. 42) that “few actually had any command of the written language (poetry and calligraphy)” and “it is basically impossible that the vast majority of courtesans could have been learned women” (p. 48); the descriptions of nineteenthcentury novels are, claims Henriot, myth; cf. Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, 29–32. On the other hand, Ellen Widmer’s studies of the courtesan sketches of Zhan Kai (. 1907) show many of his courtesan acquaintances were literate. “Inecting Gender,” 144. In Mu Zhen Shan Ren’s novel Jin’s female cousins are tutored, and his daughter is schooled along with her brothers: we know some of the prostitutes at least came originally from similar backgrounds. The curriculum for women’s education was extremely contentious at this juncture and displays confusion over the matter, the late Qing manifesto for education “not formulated with reference to late imperial women of talent but in virulent opposition to her,” as Joan Judge writes in “Blended Wish Images: Chinese and Western Exemplary Women at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Nan nü 6.1: 102–135 (2004), 133. 53 See Zamperini, “Eros and Suicide,” For centuries, the imperial state had managed the supply of entertainers and the sex trade, forcing wives of criminals or political outcasts into servitude in military brothels. As for mediaeval witches, the litmus test was a negative one: the truly chaste would commit suicide, and those who submitted to the violation demonstrated themselves to be unchaste. Matthew Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China, 213. The notion of heroic chastity was deeply engrained, and remained so in the twentieth century.

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stood little chance of enhancing her memory. For a courtesan, there was no such moral imperative to serve relatives and full family duties that drove the imperial programme for widow-chastity.54 Pity brought no memorial arches. Aiqing is the only female gure in Qinglou meng whose character is well developed and she emerges a strong-willed, mature woman. It is Aiqing that sets the conditions of her union with Yixiang, stipulating examination success before consenting to marry him and voicing her concerns about his restless ways. She, the fallen female, guides him along the right path, advising him to give up women and study more (Chapters 24, 26), much as the actor Huifang 惠芳 sets his lover Chunhang 春航 on course for an ofcial career in Pinhua baojian. Once married, however, Aiqing is subject to the usual constraints of a wife, subject to her husband and enjoying separate entertainment from the men at her birthday party (Chapter 50).55 This ‘correct’ show of behaviour is seen in other red-light ction, and accords with the intent of Qing legislation in allowing base groups to reform (zixin 自新), and coercing prostitutes to congliang (從良), literally ‘follow the good:’ take a husband, or quit prostitution.56 Increasing restrictions on women appearing with men in public reinforced this notion of separate spheres and women’s subordination.57 The nal, and most glaring injustice to the women of Qinglou meng from a modern standpoint is the fact that their redemption comes from Yixiang’s turning away from his lifestyle, deserting his wife and children, and eventually returning to earth as a heroic saviour gure. The women’s escape, having themselves redeemed and reintegrated Yixiang into society, can only be mediated through their lover’s eating a Daoist pill and having all feelings for them excised.

54 See e.g. Janet Theiss, “Managing Martyrdom: Female Suicide and Statecraft in Mid-Qing China,” Nan nü 3.1: 47–76, 53. 55 Real-life examples from the Ming document working courtesans who participated in garden culture and leisure activities alongside men, but who once betrothed would not even attend a mixed-sex gathering in their own birthday honour. See Alison Hardie, “Washing the Wutong Tree,” in Berg and Starr, eds., China and the Quest for Gentility, forthcoming. 56 On congliang see Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society, 235–41. The term had originally marked a changed legal status, i.e. a manumission, but came to mean leaving prostitution by marriage. 57 Compare Henriot’s contention with regard to sexuality that nineteenth and twentieth-century society was subject to a ‘social’ inhibition on sexuality, strictly excluded form public life, but that it still retained in private the legitimacy and lack of prudishness that characterised earlier generations. Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, 9–10.

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The Group Male: Fengyue meng

The reader who glances down the poetic couplets of chapter titles that form an index to Fengyue meng is not left in much doubt as to the tenor of the novel. Friendship, debts, go-betweens, opium, dreams, police brutality, incarceration and bribes all feature in chapter headings. Some are stark, despite poetic parallelism. Chapter 27 reads: Old Mrs Wang on account of poverty sells her daughter Young Miss Lan has a good complexion to snare a man,

while the subject matter of Chapter 23 is anticipated: The police cause a commotion in the Smoke and Flower Halls [brothels]. The sworn brothers privately access Death-Row Prison.

The preface and rst chapter to Fengyue meng present one of the strongest narratorial condemnations of the brothel industry and of clientcourtesan relations of any work of red-light ction, in a devastatingly negative view of humanity, and set up the dynamics of narrator-readercharacter relationships. The aural and visual allure of women’s nery and musical skill, explains the narrator, invidiously draws young men towards prostitute houses: at rst, they join a boating trip to ogle the sights, but soon they are entranced and nd themselves led into courtesan quarters. Addiction to opium is just as gradual, and as inevitable. No matter if someone is habitually a complete miser, those prostitutes inside the opium dens will entice you with their owery talk and cheat your money into their pockets, duping you until you view your wife and children as strangers, and you suspect that these places can outlast heaven and earth.58

Kept women are always dissatised: If [you buy them] clothes, they’ll say the material, or the colour, or the style is no good, or that the colour of owers on the embroidered edges is no good, or that they are too long, or too short. If it’s jewellery, that the gold colour is too light, or the silver ‘touch’ is poor; that the design is not fashionable, or the gold is not well smelted, the jade not well set. Hairpins will be too long or too short, a bracelet aperture too big or

58

Fengyue meng, 16.

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too small, head-dress straps too tight or too loose, earrings too light or too heavy.59

The unrelenting vitriol is amusing, but the narrator turns to more poignant effects of warped relationships: If people treated their parents with the same care that they treat their beloved tarts, when they wanted clothes, giving them clothes, when they wanted food, providing food, when hit, not striking back, when scolded, not answering back—they would be seen as the most lial sons under all heaven.60

The anatomy of the eeced, the eecing, and the free-loaders that the narrator describes covers both women—in their three classes of response to philandering husbands, from the most upright, suffering in contained resentment, to the shameless who decide that if the husband is away playing, they might as well play too—and men, whose self-deception in matters of love is equally desperate. Like its successor Qinglou meng, the preface and opening chapter of Fengyue meng cast characterisation in terms of memories of youth: the lter is the author’s own intellectual laziness, and deluded brothel years through which he envisions the characters and action of the novel. To the charge that “This book is patently true—how can you say it’s a dream?,” the preface writer responds with an onomatopoeic chuckle, that truth is a dream, and dreams truth. Fictionality is a laughing matter. The reader may take characters as real, but whatever is real will slip away. Chapter One of Fengyue meng presents an oblique discourse on the conjunction between author, ction, and characterisation. The rst half of the chapter is an invective, in the voice of the elderly narrator, against the sensuous allure of women, drug abuse, courtesans who eece, extort and dupe, the effects of brothels on family life, and the extreme self-deception of males, all narrated in the category of ‘things I have seen.’ This ties ction intimately to the life of the speaker/author, as a form of ctionalised autobiography. The narrator claims to have lost count of the number of women who stuck to him like lacquer, professing delity, only to go off with someone else; of women who pocketed his money and married someone else, who found another client or escaped back home with his cash. The second half of the chapter, meanwhile, marries pure ction with a debate on the 59 60

Fengyue meng, 17. Fengyue meng, 17.

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textual heritage of the novel. As the narrator encounters Guo Lairen and the Man in the Moon in the mountains, it is evident that all three are serving time. The Man in the Moon was banished to earth until all lascivious actions and desires are no more, after some injudicious (but well-intentioned) meddling with human fates and unions. Guo Lairen, the author of a novel entitled Fengyue meng, has seen through the dust of the world, while the narrator is doing penance for his thirty-year stint among courtesans. Unlike Qinglou meng, Fengyue meng is keen to distance itself from earlier romances with their “false settings in the Han, Tang, Song and Ming,” or their formulaic partnering of good character with bad character, and from works which harm their readers.61 The chapter splices together a realistic fume on brothels, a characterised transmission of that fume by ‘immortals,’ and an acknowledgement of the ctional novel’s literary antecedents. By placing this as the rst chapter, the author insists that the narratorial viewpoint and play on ction are seen as part of character. Patrick Hanan has argued that the relationship of prologue to the rest of the novel should be seen as a function of genre, the cautionary essay set alongside the more complex and subtle writing of Fengyue meng, since there was no other stance the author could have taken in the preface.62 Hanan is right, but the author need not have spent the prologue and lengthy rst chapter in such a superb example of cautionary invective. The prologue in Fengyue meng is more than a complement to the standpoint of the novel: it is a tri-part comment on narrator, character and ction, integral to the reading of the whole novel. 3.3.1

Narrated Character

The deliberate blurring of boundaries between memory and creative writing is carried through into Chapter Two, where the characters we meet bear an uncanny resemblance to the set of traits that the author/narrator has railed against in his rst chapter. Characterisation in Fengyue meng is predicated on the topos of nemesis, the anticipated fullment of the warnings found in the preface chapters. A causal relationship between delinquency and environment is clear. Yuan You, whose genealogy heads the chapter and whose biography precedes his

61 62

Fenyue meng, 21. Hanan, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 55–56.

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appearance, and his friend-in-exile Lu Shu, both had doting parents (niai 溺愛), a disinclination to study, and a gang of bad friends, echoing the precise conditions for a brothel habit of the preface. Despite the best efforts of his father and grandfather in purchasing a low rank for him, a brush with the law results in three year’s internal banishment for Yuan You, completed just before the story begins. If a short biography helps the reader to place Yuan You as reasonably well-born, but cosseted and misled during his youth, our introduction to Lu Shu’s character is equally external. ‘Characterisation through accoutrement’ is a persistent feature of the narrative. We have already been wooed with an extensive description of Lu Shu’s clothing on rst appearance in Chapter Two, but at the beginning of Chapter Three a re-cap before his rst trip out elucidates the purpose of such extensive sartorial accounts: these are effectively ekphrasis, painting a word picture of characters. After returning home to his relatives, Lu Shu . . . . changed into a vermillion colour quality worsted Liang dynasty style hat with a high crown. He wore a two-tone blue corded-silk lined robe, tied around his waist with a silk belt with a white jade dragon-and-tiger clasp; attached to which were a western fob-watch, a fan, a lychee bag, a small knife and such objects, and on the outside he wore a black cordedsilk lined jacket.63

Appearances matter. For female characters, descriptions of their facial features (particularly eyebrows, lips and dimples), hairstyles, foot sizes and jewellery are added to such detailed narration of clothing at each rst meeting, in passages which can easily take a half-page of text.64 It is not just individual characters, but the character of the setting that is built up throughout Fengyue meng in minute description. In the same chapter, we are treated to at least three close-up shots: of the panelling and decor of Yuan You’s parents’ house, the exact composition of each 63 Fengyue meng, 31. Compare Matteo Ricci, two centuries earlier: Every day, “the men take two hours to do their hair and dress themselves meticulously, devoting to this all the sweet time they can.” Quoted in Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (London: Faber, 1985), 43. Hanan argues that the specicity of dress in the novel was “no doubt intended to emphasise the characters’ shallowness,” (Hanan, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 43), but the sense of judgement is not so evident: the excess could show a narcissistic care over appearance, but also a healthy self-regard, sense of fashion, appreciation of nery. Since the lists herald the introduction of each character, they are also, as Hanan notes, a feature of literary value in themselves. 64 See, for example, the introductions to Fenglin and Qiaoyun on pp. 62–63.

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of the dishes ordered for lunch—the ham and crab-meat exhaustively detailed, with a rhetorical ourish as hot towels to wipe characters’ faces are produced—and of the glass, steel and bamboo of the addict Wu Zhen’s smoking apparatus. After the narrator’s gaze has followed a servant setting up the opium pipe, with its turquoise tip and gold dragon mouth-piece, on a kang bed, the focus homes in on Wu Zhen, as “at his waist hung a gauze multicoloured smoking casket pouch, from which he extracted a cloisonné and sycee silver smoking box encircled with pearl, on the lid of which was a lion rolling a ball, and the eyes and tongue of the lion were like the ball, forever moving.”65 Each of these three close-up shots is too detailed to be the momentary glance of another character, or to take place at the real-time speed of the narrative. In this layering of exquisite detail, characterisation is deliberately being built up through the narrator, who by convention can speed up and slow down a narrative. After the description of Wu Zhen’s tobacco box, we are told it must be from Shanghai—Yangzhou craftsmen not having such skill—placing the level of narratorial knowledge above that of the reader, but below Wu Zhen. The narrator is always present in the depths of a reader’s consciousness, but rarely apparent, the characterised author/narrator of the preface lurking on in the reading of the framed text. Occasionally, the narrator’s separate vantage point is revealed by a narrative marker such as na zhi (那知) to introduce information that only X-ray vision or telepathy should allow, such as Lu Shu and his would-be lover Yuexiang entwining hands under the table.66 The narrator is distinguished by greater perception than other characters (for example, noticing Lu Shu’s infatuation earlier than others) and by a more thoughtful voice: the question of why other characters are not furnished with such an introspective or insightful voice presumably relates to author function. In this conception of characterisation, there can only be one creative author, who places characters into a setting, and whose cognitive role is mediated through the narrator; characters are not each given a full human awareness from which to speak out of their setting.

65 66

Fengyue meng, 35. Fengyue meng, 57.

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Given the breach in perception between the narrator of the preface and the narrator of the story-text, and between the viewpoint of the narrator and of other characters, the role of the reader is made more critical in assessing character. Two instances serve to illustrate this. In Chapter Seven, the cohort of friends and invited courtesans are indulging in a post-prandial drinking session, following an opium-induced nap. Finger-guessing games with alcohol forfeits soon bore, and a game is proposed where men compose riddle answers, and women sing songs as forfeits (see Chapter Four below for a fuller description of this). Guilin’s rst song is dismissed as too conventional and elevated, and Wu Zhen proposes a ne for anyone who follows suit. Fenglin’s mournful ballad tells of sadly painting eyebrows, and wasting away to a skeleton for the sake of a lover, but when Wu Zhen makes a pointed comment about a connection to her life with Jia Ming, Jia wants no such interpretation: “There’s no need for such overblown [lit. banging on drums and striking the strings] talk: Yuan You, get on with your riddle sequence.” The next song from Shuanglin, about the positive qualities of a lover which ends with the phrase “I don’t know if you’re willing or not?” again elicits an in-joke from Wu Zhen linking the song sentiment to her lover Yuan You, a reading Jia brushes away. Yuexiang’s offering, with a phrase about a lover who casts his beloved away half way through their journey, is universally decried, and she is forced to sing again as a forfeit, choosing a lament of Lin Daiyu, jilted by Baoyu for Baochai: heartbreak is acceptable if ctionalised, and easily distanced. The sub-text to each song is characterisation: to what degree do we, the characters, assume congruity between song and singer? The addition of a song sequence in the voice of Honglou meng’s Lin Daiyu removes any doubt that the point refers onwards to text and reader: to what degree do we read song texts in ction as pertaining to the character who voices them? The reader is invited to a double reading: their own perspective on the match between the sentiments and the girls’ life events, and the interpretation Wu Zhen gives. In the second example, the triangle between reader, character and narrator is held in tension over the course of several chapters. How we read the character of Yuexiang depends on the interplay between comments from the narrator and the ow of events. The narrator gives the reader to understand that Yuexiang is using Lu Shu, plying him for all she can get out of him. After being told how much he has spent on her, we are told in a rare moment of self-reection: “Yuexiang

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saw that Lu Shu was young, and that his character was good, and that he was reputed to be gentle, and that he ashed money around, and thought to herself that she was already sixteen, and had been in the brothels for several years, and knew a bit—how could she not desire him? Whenever she met with Lu Shu, she was entirely cordial and intimate, cuddling him and getting close; she was only afraid that someone would see what they didn’t want to see, and it would not succeed.”67 Our reading of Lu Shu is freighted with a sense of his naivety, but the character of Yuexiang is more difcult to assess, because of ambiguity in narration. In the next chapter, Chapter Twelve, preparations are made for the rst night, and Lu Shu’s friends celebrate with him in anticipation. In the event we are told, no matter how much silver he had paid, he was drunkenly befuddled and could not tell if she were a virgin or not.68 Yuexiang vows her willingness to marry him, she just needs to wait to negotiate with her uncle. A rst reading allows for her innocence, but soon the reader suspects her complicity, as she joins with her madam in naming debts before him. Once other characters criticise Lu Shu for wasting money, the omens are retroactively clear in the narrative. By the time Yuexiang is claiming to be ill, and a worried Lu Shu notices she is not feverish, and plies her with medical attention, only a particularly naïve reader might side with Lu Shu against an equivocal narrator in believing she is pregnant.69 When Lu Shu nally accepts he has seen through her ruses, and a painful altercation follows, Yuexiang professes in tears that she was a virgin when she took him on, and hasn’t seen another client since.70 Her naivety in pointing out to her madam that she has noticed his rings and jewellery have gone, when the madam suspects his money has run out, again confuses a reader: could she be so trusting, after all? The line between deceit and self-delusion, victim and victimiser in the brothel is so faint that characterisation remains elusive; inconsistency is a component part of the narrator’s presentation to reader. Our introductions to the male characters are completed in Chapter Four, where the band of friends swear brotherhood bonds at Wei Bi’s 魏璧 suggestion aboard a pleasure boat. As the narrator points out, Wei 67 68 69 70

Fengyue Fengyue Fengyue Fengyue

meng, meng, meng, meng,

113. 123. 141–2. 175–6.

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Bi’s father was a higher ofcial—who would refuse to participate? The men of Fengyue meng are essentially idlers, without positions of great social worth.71 The ve are not the innocent young men of the introduction, ensnared by females, and the disparity between the authors’ depictions in the preface and the gradual revelation of character throughout the novel tempers our reading of female characterisation. The last of the all-male chapters gives us an opportunity to see the men interacting with others outside of the in-group. It is not an edifying sight: Yuan You is angered at meeting a debtor and sits calculating, at laborious length, the interest on his usurious transaction for the cornered friend. Wu Zhen cuts short his mourning for a relative, not waiting for the dressing of the corpse, to come on the boating trip, and Wei Bi, angered at the price hike and unhelpful attitude of the boatmen, sends a servant to procure one of his father’s calling cards to exert inuence. By the time the men are sated with food and drink, have declared their friendship, and their minds begin to turn to women, we have encountered a group of self-serving, petty schemers. Women are introduced to the trip, and by extension the novel, as an afterthought, to relieve boredom. Jia Ming points out as they board the boat that it might be a bit lonely and tedious with just the ve of them—why not invite Wu Zhen’s lover along too? Since his courtesan can neither sing nor dance, retorts Wu Zhen, it would be about as exciting as bringing a mute aboard—but he has heard that there is a new girl at the Jade Tower, both talented and beautiful, why not try getting her along . . .?72 3.3.2

Group Characterisation

Fengyue meng can be neatly divided into two halves, the rst sixteen hui centred around the establishment of individual characters within a group setting and the second sixteen developing these characters through ve pairs of male-female relationships. While the coupled relationships provide greater depth in characterisation, an appreciation of the group dynamics reveals the interface between plot and character, as well as marking out the social setting of the novel. The men gather together as a group in the tea-houses and brothels, but also as part of 71 On nineteenth-century clients, Henriot (Prostitution and Sexuality, 234–7) notes the general terminology of ‘rich merchants and scholar nobles,’ but sources show a predominance of merchants over scholars—which tallies better with the legal prohibitions on anyone of ofcial status visiting a prostitute. 72 Fengyue meng, 44.

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much larger crowds, where characterisation takes on a different hue. Literary crowds are a common trope in nineteenth-century novels: associated with markets, temples and festivals, innocuous crowds whose gathering marks the seasons in life and literature. Fengyue meng, termed the rst city novel in China by Hanan, is unusual among mid-century red-light works in that it contains lengthy descriptions of street life, forming a walking guide to the layout of Yangzhou.73 Anonymous crowd scenes are depicted through the eyes of one of the main characters, describing in more rareed language the noise, stench and bustle of this provincial port. On the Fifth day of the Fifth Month, Lu Shu and coterie have been out on the water, teeming with dragon-boats of all colours, watching the local custom of the dragon-boat racers diving with ducks. Everyone is gloriously decked out in their nery, greeting each other, leaping off the boats onto the banks. There are plenty of opportunities for peopleviewing, with incense sellers, musicians, and children performing street acts for pocket money: On both banks were groups of male and female sightseers, some carrying male children, some shouldering female babies. Women from the countryside were wearing calamut leaves on their heads [to ward off evil], and strings of sea mint, pomegranate owers and buckwheat hung around their necks. Smeared with black wax and pasted with white lead [powder], children were running around with pairs of new, dark cloth shoes on their feet, embroidered with red leaves and pretty ve-coloured owers, calling out to grannies and aunts, pushing their older sisters and pulling along younger ones, baked in the sun until dark sweat ran off them. There were also a few drunkards exuding alcohol vapours amid the crowd of women, jostling and bumping into them. Every type of small trader was heading to the market to do business: it was all extremely lively. A contemporary has written a ve character regulated verse entitled “Viewing the Dragon Boats on the 5th of the 5th Festival”: [A poetic version of the above follows.]74

By switching language modes, between thought, elevated description and verse, the narrator is able to direct focalisation, and place and remove

73 On Yangzhou as the setting, “and to some degree the subject” of Fengyue meng, see Hanan, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 36–39. Hanan dicusses the street names, tea-houses and institutional features of Yangzhou that appear in the novel, as well Yangzhou poems, ballads and art work, and links to earlier Yangzhou novels such as the anonymous 1821 Yaguanlou 雅觀樓. 74 Fengyue meng, 130.

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characters in a scene at will. The reader is present as voyeur alongside characters: watching the bare-footed religious outside the temple passing iron awls through their hands, or stepping on hot ash unharmed. Each major festival means there will be a procession in town or some other festivity, and one of the group of ve friends will suggest a trip out, often arranging to mark the event in conjunction with someone’s birthday. At the end of the day the friends return to carry on banqueting and drinking with their favoured women. These are the rituals of life, and in Fengyue meng characterisation is dictated by the structures of calendrical engagements. Ritualised narration follows: the party scenes, as in other red-light novels, are full of tedious repetition.75 Crowd scenes in Fengyue meng accord little with the mob violence theories of crowd behaviour that were formulating among nineteenthcentury French sociologists, but occasionally there is a frisson of danger, as when trinket-sellers get vocal, or beggars accost a servant.76 There is plenty of institutional violence against women in red-light works, but few incidents of group violence. Fengyue meng is notable in presenting the seedier side to life, although both the crowd and the danger are contained. In the only serious incident, in Chapter Eight, hired thugs come to the Qiang household to cause trouble, but these turn out to be subcontracted louts, part of a protection racket. Several dozen people carrying torches break into the house and smash up the furniture. Qiaoyun has her hairpins, earrings and money stolen from her, and the courtesans, hiding, are shaken up, but no-one is seriously harmed. The focus of female activity during the rst sixteen chapters of the novel is the brothel, with women residing in and operating from a communal base; this spatial locus also interacts with the wider question of family. The brothel was a community of women often under female management (although Qiang Da’s establishment, where several of the

75 When Yuexiang is singing songs at a drinking gathering, for example, the phrase: “When Yuexiang nished singing, everyone applauded” is repeated verbatim within three lines of text. Fengyue meng, 55. 76 Fengyue meng does not shrink from descriptions of the thugs smashing the interior of the brothel. Sommer, 305, writes of the growing crowd of rogue males at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale looming large in the popular mind, and being behind much of the repressive legislation on sexual intercourse. On threats and extortion, see particularly Bradly W. Reed’s writings on the yamen runners, in e.g. Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). On the crowd see e.g. George Rudé, The Crowd in History 1730–1848 (London: Lawrence and Wishard, rev. ed. 1981); J.S. McClelland, The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

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girls live, was headed by a male) and functioned as a counter-family, providing a source of kinship bonds for the women.77 Relationships between the girls in the brothels are depicted as cordial ones of sistership, displayed through daily grooming rituals. Unlike their men however, the sorority have not chosen one another’s company. There is noticeably less emphasis given to the group activities of women in the text, compared with the primary group of the ve males, where the socialising spaces of tea-house, restaurant and theatre foreground male pleasure.78 The men may invite each other round to meet at a certain female’s quarters, but the females have no similar authority to issue group invitations, except by extension through their particular male. An area of marked difference in the portrayal of male group relations versus female-only group interactions lies in discussions of sexuality and the opposite sex. Novels focusing on women’s lives, and exclusively on their sexual experience in love and marriage, reproduce an ideology where women are dened through their sexuality, as the sex to be understood.79 Three of the female protagonists in the novel speak in lengthy soliloquies detailing their sexual histories, but there is no equivalent male subjective voice recorded; the menfolk choose rather to discuss the women’s lives. The women as a group do not entertain any discussions on male sexual attractiveness (although we might assume this is something women in the sex trade did discuss among themselves), yet the entire thrust of early tea-house discussions in Chapters Two and Three of the novel is the relative merits of various female courtesans.80 77 On the organisation of brothels in Shanghai, both individual and collective dwellings, external features demarcating the houses, numbers of girls, fees etc. see e.g. Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, Chapter 9. 78 On the four ‘cardinal points’ of the courtesan world: music hall and theatre, restaurant and tea-house, see Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality 37–46, and illustrations. Since the women were either on stage, or seated behind the menfolk at table, or rushing between call-outs, it is hardly surprising that although seemingly focal, they occupy less physical and narrative space. 79 Rosalind Coward, “The True Story of How I became my Own Person,” in Belsay and Moore, eds., The Feminist Reader (London: Macmillan, 1989), 44. As Foucault has famously shown, concern with sexuality is a means of exercising power, by determining the identity of the subject through control and classication of its sexuality. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). 80 See, for example, p. 36, where Yuan You has invited all to a tea-house: “all that they talked about was assessing and asking about courtesans, buying smiles and chasing pleasure.” While male sexuality is not a topic for female discussion, they may indicate

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Sexual performance is taboo for both sexes; it is only the beauty, and expectations of women, that are raised. While the females in Fengyue meng are strong and wilful individuals, their characters often surpassing the males in this respect, their social function is mainly as adjuncts. With severe restrictions on freedom of movement, women lack the individual autonomy of the males. Permission is usually only granted for the women to travel alone where the distance is short and the object of travel well-dened. When Guilin ees home by boat to Yancheng to avoid her debts the assumption is made explicit that the brothel owner Qiang Da would usually have someone follow her out.81 (This situation is noticeably reversed by the end of the century, with high-visibility courtesans parading in the public spaces of the theatre and restaurant.)82 With bound feet ranging from just under four to just over ve inches (cun 寸, noted at each initial description, as a measure of beauty or desirability) the women had little hope of running far. When travelling to group events or meeting points, characters always arrive in gendered droves, with the men listed rst, and perform greeting or gift rituals appropriate to their sex.83 Group activities extend into areas a modern reader might demarcate personal. Apart from the ritual partying and waking-up ceremonies for newly-conjoined couples, mediation between angry partners and between clients and regulars is performed by members of the friendship group. The women’s quarters within the houses of prostitution were very public places, unlike the chambers of a full or rst wife where the woman ruled her private domain. In Fengyue meng the women’s private rooms double as their salons. When Wu Zhen is arrested at Guilin’s place on charges of opium possession, he is not taken aback by the men walking into the bedroom, since he expects his friends to do so, and only reacts when he realises the intent of the intruders. Jia Ming, as self-styled spokesman for the group, sees it as group business to go choice or desire through body language: Yuexiang ashing her eyes at Lu Shu portrays this clearly. Female sexual desire has long been seen by feminists as a force capable of rupturing the patriarchal symbolic order; Fengyue meng examines women’s lives through its portrayal of women and their actions via the narrator and male characters, but does not develop a true reexive female voice. 81 See e.g., Fengyue meng, 235. 82 Cf. Yeh, Shanghai Love. Yeh describes this change in terms of the emerging new character of the urban female, linking her visibility in text and particularly illustration to a status reversal between client and courtesan 83 See e.g., Fengyue meng, 134.

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and intervene when Lu Shu and Yuexiang’s relationship is strained by Lu’s attempted intercourse with another woman; again when Wei Bi attacks another of his paramour Qiaoyun’s clients, Jia Ming’s skills at conciliation are put to use.84 Female dependency is seen in their recourse to male mediation between aggressive or difcult clients. The society revealed in the early chapters of Fengyue meng is a relatively segregated one, with couples attending social events in single-sex groups. The picture broadens as the novel unfolds and narrative action centres on dialogue between pairs of lovers, with action migrating between the highly contrasting relationships of the ve couples. An examination of two of these sufces to show the ways in which characterisation in the novel is formed through these paired relationships. 3.3.3

Bilateral Relations: Purchase and Betrayal

At one level the relationship between Jia Ming and Fenglin most fully plays out the warnings of the preface, as jealousy and treachery embitter each partner. The circumstances of the relationship reveal its self-limiting set-up, destined to fail. Fenglin is caught between economic and narcotic traps: her husband and family depend on her income, and she cannot wean herself from opium addiction, even with her lover’s help and support. In re-enacting a life story that becomes as familiar as the endless recounting of hardships by Xianglin’s Wife in Lu Xun’s “New Year’s Sacrice,” Fenglin provides the rst female retrospective analysis in Fengyue meng, describing the early loss of her mother, her training in the arts, and sale into prostitution from the age of thirteen sui; her account echoes throughout the novel.85 Initial moves in relationships are very public ones, testing out afrmations of love before an audience of friends.86 In offering to take on her debts if she forms a main bond with him, Jia Ming provides for Fenglin’s immediate material needs but lays the foundation for the

84

Fengyue meng, 168, 170. Fengyue meng, 78. 86 Relationships with courtesans had to be initiated via intermediaries, in good part because of the level of trust and debt through which the system operated among highclass girls to bypass upfront nancial transactions. Debts were paid in arrears at the end of each season: on Shanghai systems see Henriot Prostitution and Sexuality, 33–35, 248–59; and Chapter 10 on costs and the complex circulation of money among players in the household (sedan carriers, musicians, maids etc.). 85

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economic relationship that she eventually rejects. As Jia Ming leaves the establishment after spending his rst full night with Fenglin, he turns back as an afterthought and proffers some money, to which she responds with stammered tenderness.87 As relationships deepen and evolve from prostitute-client to lovers, the women’s obsequiousness wanes, and the nancial dependency is taken for granted. In terms of economic bondage, while women do not own their own bodies, the capital is worthless without their coöperation. Fenglin recognises this in discussing her sale price, where she uses herself as a lever in blackmail-style bargaining. Her logic is relentless: “If you are not willing to let me go, I won’t force you. But from today, I won’t let Jia Ming into the house and won’t take other clients.”88 Fenglin’s willingness to break her bonds with Jia Ming and disappear at the close of the novel with a visiting ofcial, and Jia’s subsequent bitterness, underline the lack of a legal or societal basis for the client-prostitute relationships. It also points to the complicated networks of relationships within which women were enmeshed, and the competing psychological demands on them, with husbands and clients (and possibly lovers too) claiming rights to their bodies. The protracted discussions between Jia Ming and Fenglin over whether she should take the offer of a loan and leave display a poignant mix of care, fear, and bravado. Jia recognises that he cannot afford to marry her properly and maintain his wife and children, but does not want to let go, feeling the years of subsistence he has paid for oblige her towards him.89 His mixture of tenderness, self-pity and denial of the strength of his attachment is not fully appreciated by Fenglin, for whom a profession of love might, despite her hard exterior, have meant more than board and lodging. As McMahon writes, “Fenglin, on the other hand, perhaps would not

87

Fengyue meng, 118. Fengyue meng, 268. That these were relationships of force can be easy to forget in some works, but as Henriot reminds us, the women were initially sold into prostitution under duress, by kidnapping or the intervention of family members (Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, 137) no matter what their later resignation to, or gain from, the situation. 89 The purchase of a courtesan as a concubine or wife was, in comparison, a more regularised transaction and usually involved paying off the—often considerable—debts of the prostitute as well as a xed bridal price. When Shuanglin marries Yuan You she hands her own money over to his care, in a symbolic economic bonding, as she is accepted into his wider family: Fengyue meng, 243. 88

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have left if yet another opium-smoking man (besides her husband and brother-in-law) had not counted upon her to entertain yet another customer in order to earn opium money.”90 The psychological insight into the tensions of the extra-familiar and highly transactional brothel relationships in Fengyue meng is impressive. The moral limbo surrounding client-courtesan relationships militates against their success, since both male and female partners have internalised the social demands of standard relationships, but their translation into the red-light world brings irresolvable tensions. The jarred, burnt-out relationships in Fengyue meng return to the question: what would a successful client-courtesan relationship mean? A muse and a marriage? If the dissolution of the relationship in marriage is the most desirable outcome for a female, as the surface narrative reads, can this ever be compatible with convoluted male desires for a tender, loving relationship, the beautiful intellectual soul-mate of tradition, and the thrill of a time-limited relationship with a beauty beyond one’s income? The withdrawal or absence of the function of reproduction set courtesans apart within society as non-mothers, symbolically sterilized, with attendant stigmas. Of the ve lead females in Fengyue meng, signicantly few have relationships with their own biological mothers. Fenglin perpetuates this cycle most evidently with her adoption of a six-year-old girl to bring up into the trade. In one of the most troubling scenes in the novel, she takes the girl away from her natural mother. Jia Ming, a consultant to the project, advises Fenglin to claim she is buying the child on someone else’s behalf, lest the parents return one day and demand her back. Fenglin checks the girl out, and sees that she has no pock-marks and quite a pleasant face, with long eyelashes—just a bit on the thin side from poor nutrition. Having bargained down the child’s mother, Fenglin calls in a scribe to draw up a sale covenant. After Jia Ming has checked the document, the child’s mother, in tears, adds her thumb print, and the broker, Old Mrs Yang, marks a cross. Fenglin hands over the cash, and the broker passes it to the mother, who wraps it in a tattered piece of cloth, . . . . . . lifts it onto her shoulder, her eyes brimming with tears, and says to the girl: “Zhuanzi, be good! You play here, I’m going on to the street to buy some fruit for you to eat.” The child was unwilling to let Mrs Wang go, and tugged at her clothes, sobbing and crying. Mrs Wang steeled

90

McMahon, “Opium,” 163.

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her nerve, and giving the child a push, shouldered the six thousand cash and left. Fenglin invited Old Mrs Yang to stay for lunch, and gave her a thousand cash for her part in the transaction; it was only at this point that Old Mrs Yang left. When the child saw that Mrs Wang had gone, her crying increased. Fenglin took her inside the house, and grabbed a handful of fruit and various snacks to try to shut her up, before she stopped crying. She combed and re-did the girl’s hair, tied a red ribbon on her plait, gave her face a wash, and brushed a bit of powder on. She hurried off to call someone to have a new set of clothes made to change her into, and hid away the tattered clothes she had on. She also called Mrs Gao in to have a new pair of socks and shoes made for her. Jia Ming chose a new name for her, and called her Lanxian; after this everyone in the household always called the little girl Lanxian. After a few days, Lanxian had got used to it, and didn’t cry. She slept with Mrs Gao at night. Whenever Jia Ming had time in the evening, he would cut out squares of red paper and write characters on them, teaching her to recognise them.91

The real-time narration of the child sale is more moving than Fenglin’s own biographical account, and presents the reader with an insight into the harsh compromises of poverty and maternal desire. The passage is problematic to us because of the seeming insouciance to the child’s needs as she is passed from one trapped woman to another. The narrated normality of the child’s settling in is disturbing, even as we see Jia Ming making an effort to be a good parent. Child sales were illegal transactions, but are presented in red-light novels as common occurrences.92 The high level of opium usage among courtesans took its toll on the capacity and desire to mother, a further cause for condemnation in a society where opium gave rise to needs in a woman which thwarted a socially expected submissiveness.93 Jia Ming gains an extra child in his second household, but has already taken on more than he bargained for: a trail of visitors and long-lost relatives seeking hand-outs appeared at Fenglin’s door from

91

Fengyue meng, 253–254. The law prevented a prostitute or entertainer from purchasing or fostering the child of a commoner in order to prevent a lowering of legal status. See Anders Hansson, Chinese Outcasts: Discrimination and Emancipation in Late Imperial China (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 42. Cf. Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society, 222, 225–50. Ming statutes against commoners being sold into prostitution included tallying all children born into such households. In terms of similar scenes in other novels, Huifang, for example, is offered a boy to train into the acting profession in Pinhua baojian, but refuses on the grounds that he wishes to leave the trade and has no desire for a disciple. Pinhua baojian, 254. 93 See McMahon, “Opium,” 172–3. 92

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the start of her involvement with him.94 When a crack-down on houses of prostitution is rumoured, several of the girls seek refuge with their main clients. Fenglin, having been pawned by her husband to the brothel owner in the rst place, cannot return to her husband and in-laws since they only possess one room, paid for out of her wages. “If I could only marry you, I’d die happy” she pleads to Jia, asking him to buy off her husband by providing an alternative wife for him.95 As a concubine, an ex-courtesan was legally and socially inferior to a wife, could be expelled or sold from the household, and would often be expected to serve as the rst wife’s maid.96 It is this salvation that the women of Fengyue meng aspire to. Variations on “I don’t know what I’d have done if I hadn’t met Jia” are Fenglin’s constant refrain in conversations with other women. It might seem a strange concept to expect a client-prostitute relationship to be ‘monogamous,’ but after a ‘main trunk line’ had been formed between a couple—a legitimising stage denoted by economic provision for the courtesan—then external relationships were vetoed.97 Fenglin’s anger at Jia Ming’s ‘cheating’ at one point in the novel is extreme: she threatens to go off and nd accommodation elsewhere, even though the rent is paid by him; her threats can be construed as a means of restoring her dignity and reestablishing the exclusive basis of their relationship. Fenglin develops a relatively good relationship with Jia’s wife, who is most accommodating and welcoming towards her husband’s paramour, in sharp contrast to Yuan You’s wife Du. Wives in Fengyue meng remain in the shadows for much of the novel, and are for the main

94

As Eastman shows, in the non-courtesan world, the socio-economic status of a bride was an important factor in a marriage decision, and in cases where her status was considerably lower than the husband’s, requests from in-laws were to be expected. Lloyd Eastman, Family, Fields and Ancestors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 24. 95 Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society, 246, documents many cases of wife sale, and sordid details from court cases of wives as payment, interest, and loans. For some gures on the cost of buying off a wife, see Henriot, 59–61. 96 Eastman, Family, Fields and Ancestors, 32. Under the Ming code adopted in the Qing, commoners could take a courtesan as a concubine but not wife; ofcials marrying an entertainment worker as either concubine or wife were subject to 60 blows and divorce. Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society, 219. 97 Cf. Henriot, 57: courtesan-client relationships had an “undoubtedly exclusive and almost conjugal character,” with a courtesan expecting a certain degree of delity from a customer. Press reports from the 1870s and 80s show examples of clients’ straying experienced as betrayal, which led to public outbursts of anger. In Haishang hua liezhuan, the basis of Xiaohong’s premeditated assault on her rival is that she has given up all clients for the sake of one.

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part dismissed as an awkward or troubling presence. Jia Ming’s wife is quite willing to allow her husband to spend most nights away from home, especially when conjugal duties include licking the pus from an ill husband’s eyes, a task which Fenglin performs admirably in loco uxoris.98 In return, Jia takes on reciprocal ritual aspects of a husband for Fenglin, accompanying her, albeit unwillingly, to sweep her parents’ graves at the Qingming festival. His dismay at her desertion is especially bitter given the self-righteousness he feels after adopting a husbandly role towards her. The double life that the males of the novel lead is highlighted by Jia Ming’s taking part in New Year festivities at both of his households. This lifestyle is draining—both Jia and Yuan are plagued by illness—and destabilising for all women involved. For a modern reader, a question mark is raised over the social construction of marriage relationships: why separate out the functions of wife and lover, if this guarantees, as the novels demonstrate, jealousy, break-ups and misunderstandings, as well as draining the male essence and energy?99 Jia Ming’s sheer disbelief that Fenglin could leave him, after all of their mutual professions of trust and love, underlies the different perceptions of relationships between men and women, a split central to their breakdown. The economic base of relations between the clients and their regular women nally undermines and destroys four out of ve of the encouplings that develop over the course of Fengyue meng. Jia Ming and Wei Bi, whose bathetic musing on the loss of their female ‘lovers’ at the close of the novel echoes the narrative voice of the rst chapter, believed that they were buying the affections and delity of the women, and their resultant sense of betrayal stems from this. With no contract or marriage bond to restrain them, the female characters show through their actions a different understanding of their freedom to direct their own lives whilst depending for subsistence on one particular male.

98

Fengyue meng, 263. Compare Henriot, writing of scholars’ representations, not historical sources: “In these women who were professionals of diversion and amusement, they found qualities lacking in their wives, or at least more discreetly expressed: elegance and charm, a lively and mischievous nature, a sharp sense of repartee, and a spirit of independence that was socially forbidden to women of good standing . . . But the relationship was unbalanced. The courtesans were basically consumer articles.” (Prostitution and Sexuality, 50). 99

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3.3.4

Suicidal Loyalty

If Yuan You and Shuanglin’s relationship is the only one to work out (prior to their tragic deaths . . .) then it is perhaps due to the tenderness, mutual respect and trust that the pair show each other. The relationship is not without cost: Yuan loses his wife and access to his house during its course. This relationship more than any other shows how characterisation of women in red-light works embodied contemporary debates on gender morality. Not only does Fengyue meng draw on debates on the male literati self and a textual heritage of red-light works, but in the life and suicide of Shuanglin it engages creatively with the double standards of Qing demands and prohibitions on women’s actions. This does not give any greater sense of Shuanglin as a human being with whom we empathise, but presents her as a character whose actions might be debated. Shuanglin’s relations with Yuan are initially mediated by superstition, a common recourse for the women in the novel. Having experienced a dream lled with symbols of conjugal harmony, and the fullment of her impossible worldly fantasies (as basic as love and marriage), Shuanglin makes a trip to a temple to determine her fate. She vows to become a nun if the divination tallies show she is condemned to life as a prostitute.100 When she sets out her hopes to Yuan You, Shuanglin reveals how tired she is after only four years of business. At the stage when she undergoes this dream, it is clear that Yuan You is merely one client among many to her. Though the reader may have only been aware of an exclusive, bilateral relationship, Shuanglin’s words disclose a wider scene behind the narrative. The illusion of a special relationship was maintained both by the reticence of the women and by the architecture of brothels, which (like modern crematoria) kept newcomers separate from previous clients.101 Yuan You is not the intellectual equal of Shuanglin. Well versed in the arts of entertainment, Shuanglin has been given an all-round education as betted a(n ideal) genteel courtesan, but is trapped rather than liberated by her talents. When Yuan You procures a couplet as a gift for her, she reads unintended mockery into the poetry. The foregrounding of gifts is a feature of relationship maintenance, but one which was in reality settled with the house accountant each quarter. 100 101

Cf. Mann, Precious Records, 34, 10. Cf. Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, 33–54.

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Yuan You’s wife Du is the archetypal jealous wife, and is given short shrift by all but the sympathetic Shuanglin (and the reader who recalls her goodness in the rst chapter). Du violates several Confucian and social codes of behaviour, including overriding her in-laws at the close of the novel, and opposing standard exhortations to wives to bear happily their husbands’ trips to prostitute houses.102 Du quarrels with Yuan You on account of his womanising and squandering of the family income, and is defended by Shuanglin, who sees her attempts at safeguarding the housekeeping money for what they are. Du was not in a strong position in the eyes of the law: jealousy was one of the seven grounds for divorce and law-suits from disgruntled wives were not looked on favourably.103 When Yuan You’s wife is sent for by her father-in-law, who warns that her husband’s death is imminent, she sends a note back to the household: You can go back and tell that father-in-law of mine, that that husband of mine doesn’t have a wife, and I don’t have a husband. Two days ago I went over in good faith to see him and, would you believe it, he made as if he didn’t know, and turned his face into the bed and pretended to be sound asleep, and wouldn’t even say a word to me. Since he is so lacking in feelings (qing), is it any surprise that I lack righteousness ( yi 義)? If he wants me to go over there now, there’s nothing much to say—I’ll just wait until he has expired then go and do my duty.104

In contrast to Du, after Shuanglin is betrothed to Yuan, she begins to take on the mannerisms and mores of an ideal Confucian wife, and a role reversal is effected similar to that of Aiqing in Qinglou meng. The other males approve of Shuanglin’s adoption of a new etiquette and her refusal to come out and chat to them as was her courtesan habit. Yuan’s family are pleased with their son’s acquisition of a new wife

102 See e.g. Lu Qi, Instructions for the New Wife, quoted in Ropp, “Ambiguous Images,” 121. As maintaining the male line of descent was the principal purpose of marriage, Du has little alternative but to tolerate Yuan You’s visits to Shuanglin, a reasonable course for a man in his situation to take. 103 Jonathan O. Ocko, “Family Conict as seen in Ch’ing Legal Cases,’ in KwangChing Liu, ed. Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China, 220. Ocko examines hundreds of legal cases of family conicts in the Qing and concludes that much family disharmony resulted from tensions between expectations based on an ideological model of family life and the realities of the immediate model—that which was practised by each social subgroup. The ideological was enshrined in law, but the law offered little hope to wronged women where hostile courts made judgments based on custom. 104 Fengyue meng, 285.

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and delighted at the prospect of a grandson. Ironically, illness robs the newlyweds of their happiness after a brief period of contented coupledom. Yuan You’s illness progresses rapidly and endangers both of them: Shuanglin’s prayers during her night-long vigils are as much for herself as for his recovery, acknowledging that Yuan represents the sole means out of the bitter sea of suffering. Prostitution for Shuanglin is something one falls into through ill fortune, and her choice of death rather than life alone represents both devotion and despair, cancelling the debts of a previous life or birth, niezhai (孽債).105 Yuan You’s entrusting of promissory documents over to her had given her a potentially adequate source of income, but she rejects this too. Readers are not spared the details of either death. Although sex has been adumbrated, we are given the full death rattle. After getting rid of the in-laws on the pretext of giving them some rest, Shuanglin has a serving woman heat some wine, claiming to be cold, and asks not to be disturbed while sleeping. She changes into ne clothes, and sits down with brush and ink to compose a long poetic statement on her life and attitudes to death, followed by a ballad in parallel prose. Checking that Yuan You is turning cold and beyond revival, she says gently: “Go slowly—wait for me, with my bitter life, to go on ahead: I’ll wait for you at the gate, since you have difculty walking with your illness; I can support you and we’ll go together.”106 She swallows down some leftover opium in the alcohol, then climbs onto the bed next to Yuan You. After the serving lady nds her and alerts the parents-in-law, they nd the note and Yuan Shou exclaims at her intelligence and ‘outstanding’ nature, such a death being the ‘good fortune’ of the household. The parents-in-law immediately have a pair of geese killed to provide blood for purging her. Shuanglin clamps her teeth so tightly that it takes the wife and maid together to force some down her throat, which she spits out. It takes several hours for the opium in her stomach to kill her, her body by then dark and purple, blood coming out of every orice. At the moment of her death, “the phlegm in Yuan You’s throat shot downwards, and the two of them expired at the same moment.”107 We are given our romantic conclusion, sealed with a poetic couplet: “When a man and woman enamed with passion (qing) die together, a pair of 105 Jia Ming too refers to this concept in claiming that his suffering has redeemed the debt of his involvement in the evil of prostitution. 106 Fengyue meng, 287. 107 Fengyue meng, 288.

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infatuated ghosts head to the underworld court.” Not quite: the sight of two cofns throws Yuan’s wife Du into such a rage that she hits her head against one and cries that she will kill herself if Shuanglin’s cofn is not removed post-haste. Fearing Du will follow through on her words, the cofn is removed and the couple buried separately. Yuan You’s wife Du’s outburst over Shuanglin’s corpse goes beyond acceptable notions of restitution or propriety, as she has the new clothes stripped from the body and threatens to kill herself if the expensive cofn is not returned. Shuanglin supersedes Du as wife in ritual through her choice of simultaneous death and is eulogised by her father-in-law for her dutiful actions. On the death of a chaste widow or suicide, the family could apply for court-sponsored honours in her name, including the right to erect archways at ancestral shrines: this was her father-in-law Yuan Shou’s action.108 Commoner morality lauded widows who chose to remain chaste, but also those who chose to congsi (從死), follow their husbands in death. The latter was repeatedly denounced by the court, but even the imperium sanctioned honours for ‘principled suicides’ after deliberation (although those wishing to sacrice their lives should rst apply in writing to the Board of Rites).109 The views on Shuanglin’s suicide recorded in Fengyue meng are ambiguous, as the topic is debated by bystanders watching the procession of the imperial tablet secured to honour her paraded through the streets. While much is made of her virtue, dissenting voices mock. Some spectators exclaim how moving her death note was, and pity her for the mode of burial; others berate the jealousy of Du; yet others point out that if Yuan had not dallied in the brothels, he would not have left his wife alone and brought about the greatest of unlial actions, dying without issue. The usual rationales for suicide—to defend chastity, vindicate one’s reputation, or to cope with the loss of the male love of one’s life—were less credible for courtesans. The difculties for the women of fully re-integrating into society are evident as taint from their profession

108 On the shift in ideal behaviour from martyrdom to long-suffering widows, see Mann, Precious Records, 25. There is a wealth of literature on widows and suicide practices in the Ming and Qing; Katherine Carlitz has documented several articles in her essay “Desire, Danger and the Body: Stories of Women’s Virtue in Late Ming China,” in Gilmartin et al., Engendering China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Ropp, ed., Passionate Women, presents several excellent articles. 109 On the exceptions and the thinking behind suicides and chastity, see Janet Theiss, “Managing Martyrdom,” esp. pp. 51–53.

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lingered.110 ‘Following in death’ was ofcially viewed as selsh, denying a widow’s in-laws the benet of her care, but family duties did not apply to as-yet-unmarried courtesans. Where a scorned woman could re-write her history through a good death, only the legitimately united could be legitimately scorned. Shuanglin’s death is paradoxically more laudable, even an ex-courtesan dying for her husband, and also more suspect, since expressing personal emotion through death was no longer deemed acceptable. As the courts in the nineteenth century began to separate out actions from status, judging by individual morality and conduct not family background, the ctional individual too is judged by his or her own actions.111 The contending voices of the bystanders recognise wider debates on the practice of suicide.112 Shuanglin’s choice ts well with Zamperini’s description of a “staged performance of death,” a moment of control, of “revitalising self-assertion in death against the lethal self-alienation in life.”113 Given Shuanglin’s troubled history, desperate desire to marry and brief interlude of happiness, death with Yuan You may well have been a positive choice in itself, and gaining honour in acceding to wider social morals a marginal consideration.

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Social reforms initiated by the Emperor Yongzheng in 1723 began a process which removed the category of jianmin (賤民), the base. Prostitutes, along with entertainers and actors, were upgraded to commoner status—and the requirements of commoner morality. Following test cases in court which were referred up towards the imperial centre, consensus emerged by the Jiaqing and Qianlong eras that once married (i.e. ‘reformed,’ zixin 自新), the previous sexual history of a woman should not count against her in determining ‘chastity’ for honours—or the punishments of men in rape cases. A wife was held to wifely virtue, and should she full the new norms, would be eligible for reward in that status. See Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society, 239, 260–6, 312. While canonisation was extended to debased groups, they did receive less money for their memorial arches. Arguments for a ‘clean slate’ which surface in the law reports show that taint was still felt. The ‘emancipation’ of the jianmin (mean people) in the eighteenth century had been, as Sommer and others have noted, not so much a bestowal of liberty but an attempt to transform their values. 111 Cf. Sommer’s discussion of ‘status performance,’ Sex, Law, and Society, 256. 112 Cf. Paul Ropp, ‘Introduction,’ “Passionate Women: Female Suicide in Late Imperial China,” Nan nü 3.1, 3, on the lack on consensus on the meaning of women’s suicide, and the shaping of twentieth-century views by the May Fourth critique of the act as misguided self-destruction by women internalising the sexual mores of men and succumbing to social forces. By the 1990s, readings of writings by Qing women posited a greater self-determination in the act, a female agency not victimhood. While Shuanglin’s life was constrained by men from start to nish, there is a strong sense of this as a self-willed choice, as free as any she makes. She can hope for, but cannot engineer, a favourable interpretation. 113 Zamperini, “Eros and Suicide,” 94.

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Courtesan examples always produce a slightly tessellated reading of life. A debate has been garnering strength on the recognition, social prestige and sense of shared gentility that male writers gained through their fascination with faithful women, as well as those who killed themselves or tragically died young.114 For Katherine Carlitz, sensuality was part of the appeal of the stories of purity among courtesans created by male writers. Carlitz writes of the vicarious experience of writers on widow suicide, where “the male narrator can experience himself as the object of desire and simultaneously share the heroism of the heroine standing up to authority,” and of suicide writings by literati as a “repressive sublimation” and means of expressing dissatisfaction with their own role or circumstances.115 This argument is close to the ‘comfort literature for frustrated males’ rationale put forward for the writing of the novels. Two problems need resolving with such a reading in terms of red-light works: it does not account for the wider context of the novel beyond the suicide gure, and it does not give sufcient credence to the deliberate ctionalizing techniques that the authors foreground. While vicarious heroism could be supposed to be a factor in an obsession with female deaths, to read a fascination with the male experience into female suicides is to imply a complicity with male novel characters in ways not always sustained by the texts. A reading of female suicides that nds more support in examples from red-light ction is the notion of women’s body as text. Immortality could be obtained through bodily action, using the body as text, in the way writing subjects sought posterity through written texts. In some instances, women actually used their skin as a canvas, thus claiming authorship over their own life.116 A two-way exchange is effected: the writings of women who killed themselves lived on as their symbolic body, and through their corporeal bodies suicides inscribed themselves

114 See Katherine Carlitz, “The Daughter, the Singing Girl, and the Seduction of Suicide,” Nan nü 3.1 (2001): 22–46, 24–25 on fascination with faithful and chaste women in the Ming. 115 Carlitz, “The Daughter, the Singing Girl,” 45. Zamperini argues in a similar vein that women’s suicidal behaviour is a male interpretation of their own powerlessness, an acceptable form of self-inscription (“Eros and Suicide,” 106) and that representations of female suicide can be seen as an expression of anxiety on the part of men, and a means of exorcising this through laughter and trivialization (97). 116 Zamperini, “Eros and Suicide,” 96. In her discussion of Shen Xiaoqing, Zamperini claim that “one of the main characteristics of female suicide is its textual nature” (96), and that “in killing herself the woman can trespass into the realm of textuality” (103).

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in the written record as martyrs, and in the writings of male admirers. Discussing female authors, Grace Fong notes the combination of writing and immolation through which Qing women made their appeals to be remembered and asserted their morally correct actions.117 In concealing about their bodies pieces of writing (for the coroner to nd), the women intended to reveal either the circumstances pushing them to death, if forced, or something about their choice and character, if self-inicted. Shuanglin’s note falls into the latter category and reveals her as determined, rational, and romantic in depths of sentiment. The problem of Qing suicide notes being relayed (and even abridged in transmission!) by and through males, is intractable. Perhaps it gives rise to a wry smile to note that the authors of red-light ction were at least aware that their own texts would suffer the same fate of editing. 3.4

Conversational Drama: Haishang hua liezhuan

The title of the novel Haishang hua liezhuan (Biographies of Shanghai Flowers) alludes to one aspect of the work: its serial depictions of female courtesans. While the title echoes the traditional literary mould of biography, the ironies of subject matter are conjoined in the work with its innovative structure: these are not self-contained individual biographies, but snatches of conversations and observations woven throughout the novel. That the traditional subject matter for zhuan biographies would be moral exemplars would not be lost on readers. That these biographies are formed out of a dialogue in dialect would not escape readers’ immediate attention either: this was an ambitious novel whose use of the Wu (Shanghai/Suzhou) dialect in characters’ speech was considered carefully by the author prior to publication.118 The opening of Haishang hua challenges its audience to a reading of character where belief is not suspended and where the intricate relationships between reader, character and narrator are openly signalled. In 117

Grace Fong, “Signifying Bodies: The Cultural Signicance of Suicide Writings by Women in Mid-Qing China,” Nan nü 3.1 (2001): 105–142. The writings of Qing women which Fong studies demonstrate that their primary aim is not posthumous glory, nor is the act itself impulsive. 118 Several commentators note that in a conversation with Sun Yusheng (author of Haishang fan hua meng) in 1891, Han described the inspiration of Honglou meng for dialect use. See e.g. Liu Tsun-yan, Chinese Middlebrow Fiction, 14. For a non-dialect speaker, the language is not particularly difcult, with common patterns soon discernible.

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this much, the narrative follows the pattern of previous works, including Huayue hen, Qinglou meng and Fengyue meng. The narrator holds a high moral ground: the opening tone is moralistic and condemnatory, with the novels’ subjects presented to the reader as awed. The paradox inherent in the representation of character in other courtesan novels is repeated here: characterisation is ostensibly the subject matter of the work, yet is always ever subordinate to plot progression. Here, though, Han Bangqing uses his chuancha technique (described below in Chapter Four) to great effect: character threads are laid down and drawn up again, with consistency a prime concern.119 The novel is written, the implied author states, to elucidate character for a purpose: the benet of the reader. Through reading the work, the reader will come to know the evils that await in the brothels, how a hag hides behind every beautiful face.120 The narrator has already been released from his own dream-trance of infatuation and immersion; the reader is yet to be purged through his (or her) empathetic reading of character. Once the reader has progressed beyond the rst chapter, characters are represented through dialogue, with few narrative asides in a text depleted of poetry, chapter-end couplets and other such traditional means of characterisation. 3.4.1

Stock Characters

A variety of stock character themes can be traced in red-light works. These include the innocent young lad, the rare wise elder gure who is able to negotiate the brothel scene and retain his dignity and respect, the female victim, and the female shrew. Although Han Bangqing uses various techniques to establish verisimilitude, his characters still form (if more credible and eshed out) versions of thematic characters. Connections between characterisation in Haishang hua and traditional Chinese theatre are notable. Both drama and this novel are essentially presentational. The four basic aspects of character that Tan Ye identies as revealed during a Yuan drama performance: physical appearance,

119 On the care with which Han ordered his characterisation for internal consistency, see Alexander Des Forges, “Building Shanghai, One Page at a Time: The Aesthetics of Instalment Fiction at the Turn of the Century,” Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 62 No. 3: 781–810 (Aug 2003), 788. 120 Haishang hua liezhuan, 1.

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social status, personality and ethic121 are readily traced in the introduction and development of novel characters. In traditional drama, a type character is not a lazy stereotype, but has a representational function, enriched by the cultural assumptions the audience bring to the character. The stock gures in ction rarely reach the levels of individuation where the reader senses a human personality in the textual character. While some are described in enough detail to form a coherent, if anticipated, whole, they share a tendency with drama roles, where “characters in the Chinese theater are representative; they are rst of all personications of ideals (such as loyalty, bravery . . .), only after that are they individuals.”122 A brief look at two of the types demonstrates traits which can be identied in repeated incarnations. The rst type is the naive young country boy come to the big city in search of fun and frolics.123 His is the most spectacular downfall. In Fengyue meng he is incarnated as Lu Shu, in Jiu wei gui as Fang Youyun 方幼惲, and in Haishang hua as Zhao Puzhai 趙樸齋. Through the naivety of a Puzhai, or his sister Zhao Erbao 二寶, the reader gains an initiation into the tranche of social life depicted in the novels without its pain and pitfalls, and is given the opportunity to side with the streetwise narrator and other characters in condemning the foolishness of the novice. Puzhai’s impatience and youthful impetuousness are coupled with an ignorance of the brothel system, leading to frequent social faux pas and eventual ostracism. Early in the second chapter of the novel we see him laughed at for his incompetence in smoking, and presented as the source of amusement for the courtesans in attendance on account of his gauche enthusiasm. In comparison to Puzhai, the young women with whom he associates are both more frank and crude in their speech, and more irtatious and adept at non-verbal social discourse. Smoking functions as a social mediator: Puzhai’s lack of experience places him

121 Tan Ye, Common Dramatic Codes in Yuan and Elizabethan Theater (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 103. 122 Qiu Wen, quoted in Tan Ye, Common Dramatic Codes, 105. 123 Novels such as Fengyue meng ( Yangzhou) or Haishang hua, Jiu wei gui (Shanghai) were very much city novels, the city traceable through the characters’ peregrinations. Different levels of prostitutes are to be found in different sectors of the city. On Yangzhou as a novel setting, see Hanan, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 41–43. On the role of the city in the Shanghai novels, see Des Forges, Street Talk and Alley Stories, Chapter Three: “Urban Narratives, Printed in Installments: Shanghai Novels as a Genre;” Yeh, Shanghai Love. Yeh examines at length the ‘new metropolitan protagonist,’ the extent to which the city itself is characterised in the Shanghai group of novels.

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on the margins of his social milieu. In Haishang hua as other novels, a distinction is formed between characters who smoke tobacco over a water bong, and those who take opium: the choice of drug alerting a reader to likely character traits. The men who take opium are in the main long-term addicts and hard-core layabouts; of the women who smoke dayan few will ever escape the brothels.124 Like a child in a sweet shop, Puzhai is enchanted by the attractions around him in the tea-houses. His instant feelings for Wang A’er 王阿二 he justies as love, or even fate,125 while still musing what to do about his previous amour, Xiubao 秀寶. In the next scene shift he is back at Xiubao’s, and makes an obvious social error, sailing close to the boundaries of decorum and distance appropriate to a high-class, untouched courtesan (qingguan ren 清倌人), by irting with her in a physical manner. In the few hours of each day spent away from women, Puzhai can nd little to occupy himself; at rst his friends just laugh at his fretful dgeting, but later on Puzhai’s lack of employment causes him to lose credibility even in their eyes. The need for a job is echoed by Puzhai’s uncle Shanqing 善卿, who reiterates that it is ne to come to Shanghai and play, but Puzhai is now past that stage and ought to be seeking employment. Shanqing’s protection and advice is accompanied by a free rein and non-condemnatory attitude, leaving Puzhai too embarrassed to ask his uncle for money once his own resources run dry. Puzhai’s naivety about the ways of the world operates in each of the major spheres of money, women and social dealings. He is surprised at the volumes of cash exchanged during gambling games and cards. Cards are a major pastime in Haishang hua liezhuan, superseding the poetry composition interludes of earlier courtesan works. An intellectual downsizing of leisure preoccupations is accompanied by an altered mode of characterisation. The deliberate self-characterisation in verse central to early works in the genre is replaced by a less self-reexive process, centred at the reader-character interface. After questioning the size of the gambling pool, Puzhai asks his incredulous

124 Opium addicts are universally maligned and frequently found in pairs of addicted couples. It is difcult for a female addict to remain at the top-level of brothel: Heting 鶴汀 describes the thin, sallow face of Guilin 桂林, noticing that two of her ngers are blackened like soot, “and wondered what sort of client took on this type of courtesan?” Han Bangqing, trans. Zhang Ailing 张爱玲, Haishang hua kai 海上花开 (repr. Taibei: Huangguan, 1995), 199. 125 “Moreover Wang A’er loves me; it seems fated.” (Haishang hua liezhuan, Shanghai Guji, 10).

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friend Xiaocun, “If you lose, do you [really] give it to them?” Puzhai is unwilling to play by the rules of the games he has engaged in: either at cards or women. Pressed for money by Xiubao’s household, he procrastinates even when hounded out onto the streets to avoid the debt collectors, having guilelessly indicated his lack of money to the courtesan. While Xiubao is trapped between any affections she holds for him and the demands for money and jewellery her madam imposes, Puzhai goes off in search of a lower class of brothel to procure comfort. Even at this level, Puzhai senses the need to retain the lie of serial monogamy, claiming when accused that the household had procured erroneous information.126 The gradual economic and moral decline that we trace in Puzhai’s character is reminiscent of Lu Shu’s descent in Fengyue meng. Though not the dominant model of woman, the traditional shrew nds incarnation in several female gures in Haishang hua liezhuan. Some of the women are truly demanding and unreasonable, and can be easily categorised in this shrewish mould. Xuexiang 雪香, for example, demands instant attention and obedience from her lover Zhongying 仲英, retaining him at her beck and call. She insists on a constant veto over his movements, until he points out that even his wife is less attentive to him. Xuexiang is more strident in her attitude toward males than the dependent position of the women usually allows them to be, and in her speech we see the levels of bitter contempt that a reective and uncowed woman can develop towards her enforced companions. A lack of respect for clients is demonstrated in both speech and action. In her aspirations for her own offspring Xuexiang’s vehemently anti-brothel stance is revealed: “If a son that I’d brought up came and dallied in the brothels just like them—it would kill me!”127 Though another courtesan present treats this as a joke and uses Xuexiang’s outburst to goad Zhongying, the force of the insult derives from its implicit truth. It is difcult to construe Xuexiang’s bossy and obstreperous attitude as stemming from anything other than her profound scorn for the men around her. Her mixture of wheedling and pleading, coyness and adamancy, demonstrate skilful manipulation of traditionally feminine wiles to her own ends. When she insists on Zhongying taking her out shopping, 126 News management and massage are central features of a well-run brothel: Puzhai is warned how a brothel will put the word about that a courtesan has been taken in order to enhance their reputation. 127 Translation from Haishang huakai, 82.

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Xuexiang wears her contempt visibly by refusing to give herself a full wash and make-up treatment before accompanying him, letting a quick wipe of her mouth and smear of powder sufce.128 In such a dialogue-heavy text as Haishang hua liezhuan, conversations prove the most important means of probing character. The strength of Han Bangqing’s novel lies in the authentic ring to its dialogues and the credible, if often cruel, reactions of characters. The reader is privy to human relationships and antagonisms enacted in conversations, rather than in the narration of intimate or conjugal scenes. Clothing and third party descriptions contribute to the eshing out of character, but on the few occasions where these occur the reader follows the view of another character present, rendered in literary terms and clichés.129 Much of the characterisation is predicated on decisions regarding relationships, and explores a series of positions: amorous, rejected, wheedling. This testing out of positions and ascertaining of mutual feelings among characters is a game of brinkmanship and bravado. Recourse is often made to third parties for the assessment of characters’ true feelings, elucidating inner emotions for their own and the reader’s benet. 3.4.2

Jealousy

Women’s relationships with men in Haishang hua are characterised primarily by insecurity. The fragility of male-female relations and their weak basis runs as a leitmotiv throughout the novel. The characterisation of women themselves, in their reactions, self-assessments and sororal relationships, again undermines the message of the preface that the novel is a warning to young men. Here, the nature of women’s lives and livelihoods depicted reads as a condemnation of brothel clients and the patriarchal stranglehold they impose on their womenfolk. While there is a certain parallelism in female-female and male-female relationships, both having the potential for moments of equality and tenderness but also for power play, jealous rivalries and victimisation, relations among women additionally have a capacity for spontaneous and genuine friendship. Whether helping each other with their hair, engaged in mutual praise and self-modesty, or trying to save their sisters from having to deal with drunken males, women’s dealings can have an altruistic quality which sets them apart from the male characters. 128 129

Haishang huakai, 83. See, for example, Haishang hua liezhuan, 4.

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Insecurity breeds jealousy. The jealousy displayed by female characters can have violent outworkings, such as the incident in Chapter Nine where Xiaohong 小紅 viciously attacks Huizhen 惠貞 in a public teahouse, but it is almost always underpinned by fear of loss. The power imbalance between courtesan and client exacerbates the situation in all but the most tender long-term relationships, where the male partner abnegates his perceived right to terminate or threaten the union at any point. Bitchy twitterings over whom to summon and whom to leave out from the daily round of invitation chits underscore the power of the male group over individual courtesan’s lives.130 Justice meted out by the group male towards female acquaintances can be fairly arbitrary, though a non-appearance at a previous party and an ill-temper are primary reasons for dropping a woman from the list. Not only do women have to submit to this rule, they have to do so graciously: “If a courtesan has a temper, what sort of business is she going to do!” comments Zifu.131 Condemnation of a courtesan extends to physical looks: one courtesan provokes comments and mirth by her sagging face and missing teeth.132 The truism of the disparity between women wanting to be loved and respected for their feelings and intellect, and men assessing them in external physical terms, is borne out repeatedly in the novel. While its consequences may be unpalatable, the deep-seated fear of women is at least rational: if a woman loses a long-term client to a rival, she loses her means of subsistence. In her premeditated and frenzied public assault on Huizhen, Xiaohong risks her reputation and exposes her desperation. She attacks her ostensible rival rather than the root cause of the jealousy, her lover Liansheng’s 蓮生 inconstancy. Even he can see this, and tells her to deal with him if she has a problem, rather than beating up other women.133 Male jealousy by contrast appears whimsical. Xiaohong is jealous and distrustful of her lover Liansheng, calling his bluff over his professions of delity. Male duplicity is often represented as an innate and inalienable right: Liansheng’s story is not water-tight, but he is still convinced that he is playing by the rules, and that it is Xiaohong who is out of

130 On the system of call out cards (a well-known courtesan could receive 50–60 invitations per night, staying 5 minutes with each), payments and movement between assignations, see Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality. 131 Haishang huakai, 87. 132 Haishang huakai, 184. 133 Haishang huakai, 115.

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order. After he returns to her household following a three-day absence and she questions his whereabouts, Liansheng replies: “I was in town, celebrating a friend’s birthday, we had a three-day banquet.” Xiaohong sneers in reply “You couldn’t fool a child!” and explains how she sent a servant over to his home the previous day, and discovered that his sedan was there. Her ridiculing of him—that he must be super-t to have walked into town, or perhaps he took a prohibited horse carriage into the city?—is supported by judicious comments from her serving girl, but scarcely troubles him. Liansheng’s deceit requires the complicity of other males, something he takes for granted. He treats his admission to his friends as a joke, and warns them, “When Xiaohong gets here shortly, don’t mention anything, OK?” The repartee between Liansheng and Xiaohong exemplies the bitterness and mistrust which threatens client-courtesan relationships, and the constant accusations and rebuttals that deception induces. Stable relationships are hardly founded on suspicions and the insecurity that comes from temporary, non-binding relations. Xiaohong claims to be angered not at Liansheng’s frequenting other women, but at his deceit, which implies jealousy on her part. Through her forthright speech the reader is offered a full explanation of her mind as she presents it. Women are consistently more transparent (garrulous?) than the male characters, who are narrated principally via the narrator. Liansheng is unable to get a word in edgeways during the two women’s antiphonal condemnation of him: . . . . he just watched them, laughing mockingly. Only when Azhu 阿珠 had nished her tasks and gone downstairs did he say to Xiaohong, “You don’t want to listen to what other people say. I’ve been with you for three or four years—is there anything about my temperament that you don’t know? If I wanted to go with someone else, I’d tell you and then go, why would I deceive you?” Xiaohong replied, “I don’t know you [at all]. Think about it: all the time recently you’ve been off to a banquet here and there, have I said anything? But now you want to deceive me—why is that, then?” Liansheng said, “It’s nothing of the sort, I’m not wanting to deceive you.” Xiaohong said: “I’ve guessed what you mean, you’re not wanting to deceive me—you’re intending on itting the nest, aren’t you? I’d like to see you go!” On hearing this he pulled a long face and turned away, saying coldly, “It’s only three days since I came and you’re saying I’m itting the nest. Have you forgotten everything I’ve always said to you?” Xiaohong said, “I was waiting for you to say that. Have you forgotten, then, where have you been these past three days? If you tell me, I won’t argue with you any more.” Liansheng said: “What do you want me to say? I said I was in the city, and you don’t believe me.”

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chapter three Xiaohong said, “You still want to try that one on! I’ll nd out and then ask you again!” Liansheng said “That’s ne. You’re in a temper now, there’s no point in talking to you; in a few days when you’re a bit more cheerful I’ll explain to you.”134

Xiaohong’s outburst and subsequent demeanour suggest she is either more enamoured, or more desperate, than she is willing to admit. At this point, another servant enters and continues to dress down Liansheng: just as the men take refuge in their banter, the women seek support from their household. Servants are ever-present and complicit in the dealings of masters and mistresses. One reason why interior reection can be minimised or dispensed with is the openness and public nature of actions in brothel circles. Han Bangqing’s threaded episodic writing leaves situations ambiguous: the reader is left waiting for more evidence which will conrm Xiaohong as a sympathetic gure or a shrewish one, and tarnish or exculpate her lover. Her next encounter with Liansheng when he visits in an attempt to pacify her, conrms the conscious playacting aspect to her character. Xiaohong’s death threats, echoing so many of her ctional forbears, are unmasked by the implied narrator who notes that her forehead has not drawn blood where she has been attempting to knock herself out on the ground.135 Although Liansheng has called her bluff and walked off, he is pulled back by the pressure of the knocking sound, his friends’ consciences, and her servant, who is presumably complicit in this staged confrontation. Again through a deected voice—here of the servant—we hear Liansheng being berated for ignoring his responsibilities and deceiving his mistress. 3.4.3

Gendered Viewpoints

Discussion and evaluation of Xiaohong’s attack reverberate through several chapters, revealing sharp differences in male and female logic. As Zifu 子富 comments to his lover Cuifeng 翠鳳, “People like you are illogical. Think about it—as a courtesan you have lots of clients, but you don’t allow your client to have another courtesan: where’s the logic in that?”136 Cuifeng’s points in reply are that women are engaged in business, and that if he would guarantee her an income, she would gladly be his alone. Zifu’s retort that she would then be eecing just him

134 135 136

Haishang hua liezhuan, 23. Haishang hua liezhuan, 57. Haishang hua liezhuan, 53.

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is countered with unassailable reasoning: if I were yours alone, who else would I eece? The economic factor in relationships is never far from the surface, and the indelities and broken promises that Xiaohong refers to nd their concrete expression in Liansheng’s failure to pay off her debts. It is the unequal treatment of lovers that has apparently so angered Xiaohong. To her, taking on another courtesan amounts to deceiving her and breaking promises. Xiaohong’s jealousy relates to the disparity in treatment between her and the arriviste rival Huizhen, who has received new clothes and furniture from Liansheng during the brief course of their relationship, while she herself scarcely beneted at all from years of acquaintance with him. Shanqing, the wise elder gure, contests this view of the situation: “What are a courtesan’s debts to do with the client? Should the client pay them back for her? After all, a courtesan doesn’t rely on one client and a client doesn’t just have one courtesan; if he’s happy he goes more frequently, if he’s not happy then he goes less frequently—there’s nothing complicated about it!”137 Such reasoning, as is pointed out, ignores the fact that a woman will divest herself of other clients to please her main lover, as indeed Xiaohong was encouraged to do by promises of gifts and sustenance. Trust and delity are tightly and destructively bound up with status. For the male, lavish spending can both denote and substitute for feelings; for the female it is a necessary but not sufcient indicator of commitment. Liansheng is trapped by the system into making promises he has no desire to keep, while Xiaohong is forced to enact a drama in order to bring attention to her plight. In their own private dissections of events, both appear cognisant of their role-play. In a case with many parallels scarcely a chapter or two later, Luo Zifu attempts to manœuvre between his recently acquired paramour Cuifeng and his long-term lover Yueqin 月琴.138 The staking out of positions between the two new lovers is mediated by a third party, Cuifeng’s mother and madam. Zifu has taken offence at Cuifeng’s disbelief that he will keep his vow not to return to his former lover, but the reader is aware that her scepticism is likely to be well grounded. Cuifeng’s own position is also ambiguous: she reassures Zifu that her mother is deceiving him, and that Cuifeng herself is aware that he is really with Yueqin, but this could be a double-bluff. Likewise her apparently

137 138

Haishang hua liezhuan, 59. Haishang hua liezhuan, Chapter Fifteen.

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genuine feelings for the about-to-be-jilted other woman could be read as faked sympathy to further her own appeal. As she points out, unless Zifu moves to her place permanently for a couple of months, the rival household will continue to invite him and make refusal difcult. Zifu’s response to this desire for proof of his commitment is to point out that moving in at her residence would impossibly cramp his routine and public life. After he substitutes a pledge to be deposited with her household instead of himself, Cuifeng claims that she had wanted a genuine token of his love, and the monetary value was irrelevant. Zifu is amazed at her avowal that a stone, given in love, would do as well. Narrative suspense is sustained by curiosity over which position will prove to be genuine. The gender implications involved in this unfolding of character, in the dissonance between their spoken and revealed selves, again form part of the structural tension in the novel between male and female roles and between the preface and main storyline. All is contingent in the shady brothel world: although Zifu has just vowed his delity to Cuifeng, she still spends this rst night of their more stable relationship with another guest. The conditional nature of relationships, which always require promises, explanations and avowals, underlies the biographies of almost all of the Shanghai owers. Same-sex relations presented in the novel are predominantly ones of friendship, characterised by shared pursuits and interests, with far less soul-searching than the intimate male-female relationships of the novel. There are moments of tenderness, of shared laughter and banter among couples and acquaintances, but the majority of relationships are imbued with this conditionality and constant need for afrmation, as in the following typical scene: Airen 藹人 sat down close to her knees. Bending towards Sufen 素芬 he whispered into her ear in a low voice: “You have always got along well with me—why are you so angry now on account of Tu Mingzhu 屠明珠? Do you think I’m going to go and sleep with Tu Mingzhu?” Sufen said “Who knows what you’re going to do?” Airen said, “Who knows whether I will go and take someone else on, but as for Tu Mingzhu, even if she wanted to be with me I wouldn’t be happy taking her on.” Sufen said, “What’s it got to do with me whether you go off with her or not? Just don’t talk to me about it!” Airen just smiled and left it.139

139

Haishang hua liezhuan, 107.

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Again, the narrative focus of the novel follows the males as they move from one scene to another, and the novel might more appropriately be entitled Biographies of Shanghai Clients, as it is their lives that provide the linkages between women. 3.4.4

The Social Ladder

The portrait gallery of Shanghai owers includes sketches from lower walks of society, the rst major one being a description of a yeji (野鶏 pheasant) establishment through the eyes of Shifu 實夫. The women’s make-up is streaky, with old grease on their necks, their clothes worn. The place is packed out, with scarcely room to stand, the thronging women displaying few of the social graces or coyness of their more expensive counterparts. Small incidents of raised tempers and angry exchanges allow the reader to form glancing impressions of the brothel inhabitants. Through such incidental observations and anecdotes, a panoramic scene of the world is created in the novel, built up through snippets and snatches of conversations. Haishang hua, along with the early twentieth-century novel Jiu wei gui, has a much vaster range of characters than the earlier novels. Families and children appear more frequently, and servants are given a more prominent role. At this low end of the brothel scale the brutal nature of transactions, and desire-led exchanges is emphasised. Shifu pities a yeji he has seen on the street, and the brothel owner asks if he wants to amuse himself with her for a while: “It’s no matter. If she takes your fancy then see how it goes. If she doesn’t take your fancy then you’ll just have wasted a few dollars.”140 Relationships are determined more by others, the lower down the scale. Indicators of the economic nature of transactions are always present, even among the higher echelons of society, their specic manifestation appropriate to the social situation. Here at the level of the street pre-payment of food is made, and the women scale-up Shifu’s order three-fold in order to detain him longer. 3.5

Reading Character

Character critics have been divided into two camps: those who believe characters can be spoken of as real people, and those who choose not

140

Haishang hua liezhuan, 91.

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to regard them in the same manner as persons in real life. In tackling the issue of character, writes Tony Williams, one runs the risk of not distinguishing adequately between ction and reality: The overly sceptical approach leads to characters being viewed reductively as nothing but an aspect of the verbal design and risks truncating a whole dimension of character, while the sacralising of character as a supra-textual entity is mysticatory and overlooks the extent to which a character in ction is rooted on the words on the page.141

In privileging character, the link between characters in the novels and extra-textual reality may be taken to be stronger than it is. As Yenna Wu, in her character study of the female shrew or virago in traditional Chinese ction, notes: “A close examination of these works indicates that the relationship of literary representation to life is indirect at best.”142 Even in the ‘realistic’ turn-of-the-century works describing the lowest levels of prostitution, there is a signicant distance between red-light ction and the vision that the stark statistics of Sidney Gamble et al. have furnished on numbers of brothels and their inhabitants, or on opium dens, an empathetic chasm between the worlds of ction and the desperation of the everyday, the debauched, the addicted.143 An ambiguity in the play on ction and reality underlies characterisation in several of the novels studied, especially those paying more explicit homage to Honglou meng. Just as the narrative framing devices of the novels provide two levels at which the text can be understood and narrated, they also provide for two distinct, simultaneous, readings of character. In a work such as Fengyue meng, both readings are held in tension: characters are presented as historical gures, or supra-textual entities, and yet are also understood to be written characters, produced according to the verbal design of the author/narrator. The rst chapter presents the novel as the unexpurgated record of eyewitness events (but by a ctitious, mythical character) whereas the second chapter reverts to more standard biographical formulae in historiographical mode. In this second type of introduction the names of the protagonist’s father and grandfather are recorded, and childhood anecdotes recounted, in a style of ction writing as old as Chinese biography. From the

141 Tony Williams, The Construction of Character in Fiction (Hull: University of Hull Press, 1993), 1. 142 Wu, The Chinese Virago, 12. 143 Sidney D. Gamble, Peking: A Social Survey (London: H. Milford, 1921).

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historical records of the Shiji to the early Qing ction Liaozhai zhiyi, characters are introduced by name, place of birth, and time of the tale. Characters are to be fully human, credibly representing humans, and fully ctional. The presentation of a historic lineage in the opening pages places the novels in the mould of writing where the name itself ‘magically’ creates a human character.144 The author authoritatively creates characters and informs the reader how those gures are to be identied and read. Red-light novels ostensibly adopt this realist position, common to plot-oriented ction, where the author alone has subjective authority over character, but through competing narrative strategies later devolve aspects of this authority to the reader, who then participates in the process of characterisation. These strategies involve foregrounding the articial component of a character, that part of knowing a character which recognises him/her as a construct, and which Phelan calls the ‘synthetic.’145 The reader of a work such as Huayue hen or Qinglou meng is periodically reminded of the synthetic, and reads character not in a state of suspended belief, conscious of the ctional world as real, but in the double consciousness of the mimetic and the synthetic. Reminders of the synthetic include means of exposing the symbolic nature of a character: the names, for example, of the two heroes of Pinhua baojian form a play on yuyan, allegory.146 Of the six novels, only Haishang hua liezhuan posits an ideal reader who comes close to participating in the illusion of the ction and taking a seat among the narrative audience, rather than this doubly aware authorial audience.147 The red-light novels move beyond a mimetic conception of character, which valorizes individuality, with their concentration on the written nature of character. Just as character is not the sole focus of narrative attention, meaning in the six novels is not xed in terms of character alone. As with the intrusive narrator, some aspects of narrative in these 144 Compare Pinhua baojian, 1; Qinglou meng, 2 etc. See Thomas Docherty, Reading (Absent) Character: Towards a Theory of Characterization in Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 62. 145 James Phelan, Reading People, Reading Plots (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 2. 146 See Lei Yong, 雷勇 “Xiaxie xiaoshuo de yanbian ji qi chuangzuo xintai” 狹邪 小說的演變及其創作心態 in Zhongguo gudai wenxue yanjiu, Vol. 2 中國古代文學研究 (Beijing: Renmin daxue 1997), 132. 147 Cf. Peter Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987) and discussion in Phelan, Reading People, 5.

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works are surprisingly close to post-modern writing.148 Whether the reader is called upon actively by the narrator to adjudge character, or is passively nudged into new awareness by the discontinuous revelations of a novel like Haishang hua liezhuan, his participation in the process is an acknowledged part of character formation. (This is complicated further when the implied reader is called upon so frequently as to form a character in his own right, as occurs in Jiu wei gui.) Even where there is little character development during the course of a novel, with preformed opinions suggested by early references or the narrator’s voice conrmed as events unfold, the reader is still expected to be actively involved in character development. Allusions to the writtenness and synthetic components of character re-afrm the notion that courtesan ction systematically draws attention to its status as artefact in order to problematise the relation between ction and reality.149 The techniques used for presenting character and story point to an amalgam of two concepts: both representing the real world, and directing attention to the reality-constituting techniques of literature. An insistence on the ctionality of characters sits uneasily alongside a notion of mimetic adequacy, of life existing anterior to its depiction—and yet characters in some of the novels, such as Pinhua baojian, were taken by readers to reveal real referents, and critics have written on the sources for characters in the novels.150 Given the world of language reform and debates on baihua in which the later courtesan authors operated

148 Docherty’s call, for example, for a new mode of analysis for post-modern texts is equally applicable to the courtesan novel, when he writes of the need for a new theoretical basis “for ctions who have self-consciousness as written compositions and which takes into account the linguistic interplay between writer and reader which goes on in the production of the text as it is read.” Reading (Absent) Character, xiii. 149 This is of course the denition of metaction which characterises post-modern writing: see e.g. Waugh, Metaction; Aleid Fokkema, Postmodern Character: A Study of Characterization in British and American Postmodern Fiction (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1991), 14–15. 150 Two of the secondary characters in Pinhua baojian were believed to have been modelled on a contemporary and his famous boy lover, although such knowledge does not affect the presentation of characters as ctional in the work. For details of the case of Bi Qiufan and his actor-lover, the model zhuangyuan’s wife, as well as other possible models for Chen Sen’s characters, see Zhao Jingshen 趙景深, postface to Wan Qing xiaoshuo daxi 晚清小說大系 edition of Pinhua baojian (xia), edited by Wang Xiaolian 王孝廉 (Taibei: Guangya, 1984), 762–64. The preface writer to the 1934 Tianyi Pinhua baojian also tells us that Tian Chunhang was Bi Qiufan; Hou Shiweng was Yuan Zicai, and these examples could be multiplied, with other characters in the novel “certainly not made up.” On the sources for characters in Haishang hua liezhuan, see Liu Ts’un-yan, ed., Chinese Middlebrow Fiction, 14 and footnotes.

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at the turn of the century, it is hardly surprising that the construct of literature, self and the outside world through language should be a prominent theme of nineteenth-century ction. Studying characters has been regarded as a useful model for understanding the construction of subjectivity in the outside world.151 If ctional characters were, because of the nature of writing, part truth, part construct, then were not their authors’ lives similarly ambiguous? It is hardly far-fetched teleology to see pregured in late Qing writings the May Fourth era belief that a new reality could be created through language. An alternative form of reality within ction is described in several works. Extra-textual reality is shown to exist, but as a mythic realm. This is the realm of Guo Lairen in Fengyue meng, the mountain-dwelling hermit who can appear and disappear at will and who presents the novel to the narratorial ‘I’ of the dream-inhabiting narrator Hua ye lian nong of Haishang hua liezhuan, or of the heavenly realms of the Man in the Moon in Qinglou meng. The mythic narratorial ‘I’ points towards the ction of the author: present in and absent from the brothel world; drawing on life experiences but not writing veriable accounts; I and not-I; dancing at the edge of the text. The real world, which the ctional world is often assumed to parallel, can only be approached via this intermediate, mythic level. This is true even of the two novels which do not have an elaborate opening section detailing the transmission of its text and ctional personality of the narrator.152 An equation of the noumenal ctional world with the reader’s world is constantly qualied by references to the textuality which controls ctional lives. This makes sense: a good deal of what is being done in the novels is absurd, the rewriting or pastiche of social norms in the frame of brothel life. Drawing attention to the construct causes the reader to acknowledge the disparity, and what the author is doing in his creative ction. Even a novel with a very different mode of narration, and hence characterisation, such as Haishang hua liezhuan,

151

See, for example, Lynch’s ‘pragmatics of character’ where changing economic and social realities in the eighteenth century (new commodities, credit arrangements) caused readers and writers to re-negotiate the way they read and used characters. Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1998), 4–5. 152 Pinhua baojian, for example, is not bounded by this double narrative frame, and claims to be an eyewitness version of events: see discussion in Chapter Two above. This query over the author undermines the status of the full biographical-style introduction to the protagonist.

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still retains a deliberate ctionalising of the novel’s opening, enjoining the reader to understand the characters as created beings, and actively to deconstruct them during reading. The tension is more acute in a late work like Haishang hua, where the absence of narratorial intrusions allows this sense of constructedness to fade during the course of a reading. The author connives with the narrator in aunting the context of characterisation in the novel’s frame, while the characters in the main body of text are written, and may be read, as if they existed beyond this inhabited text. For the characters of red-light ction, whose selves are set within a given milieu and develop little, a choreographing of character interaction provides an alternative reading model for individuals who are more representative gures, and less thinking human subjects amenable to psychoanalysis. We come to a reading of character through relationship, through symbol, and through external manifestations such as dress. We do not read Qinglou meng to follow the life and development of Yixiang, its principal character, but we follow the course of his life as we read the novel which describes him and his harem. Here the function of the narrative is not the gradual revelation of character: characters are largely determined by their narrated state at the outset and undergo little evolution. There is little interiority or self-reection, and it is the total world depicted rather than the life of any individual within, or her thoughts on that world, which draws attention. Characters are not so much individuals with a credible and coherent set of characteristics, as a series of positions. A great amount of imaginative work has to be done if the reader wishes to approach the inner worlds of the characters: making sense of the acts of individuals would require accepting the explanations of the narrator or of other characters in the novel as they re-narrate events. Selves are subordinate to situations, in a mode of narration related to the purportedly didactic function of the novel. The individual is a product of, and window into, a moral world from which the author has already distanced himself by his condemnatory prefatorial stance. This makes for a complex reading of the moral world characters inhabit, since we, the reader, are ostensibly assumed to possess a cultural grammar close to the author’s own, but this often proves to be an inaccurate interpretative context for the body of the text. The inferences a reader makes are guided both by the author/narrator’s take on characters, and the world of the novel itself, initiating us into how to read the morals of its characters and to re-adjust our horizons to assess the

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characters on their own terms.153 This learning process may include the complete rejection of the values voiced in the preface. The loss of a commentating narrator shifts the emphasis away from the implied author’s ( judgmental) standpoint, and the reader is invited to construe characters on the basis of an interaction between their own moral universe and the characters’ self-assessment. 3.6

Conclusions

The ctional basis of characterisation is paramount across the six novels. Whether the highly narrated characters of Qinglou meng or Huayue hen, or the vocal characters of Haishang hua liezhuan, characters remain created beings. Characters develop and open out through the strategies described—dream, poetry, conversation—and through the patterning of interactions with other characters, but are constrained by the machinations of plot and the character of the narrator. Characterisation needs to be read in conjunction with an analysis of the narrator because of the intertwining of the two positions, particularly in texts where the synthetic nature of character is revealed by the narrator’s constant calls for judgements on actions. The writtenness of characters transcends other divisions among the group of novels, and is tied to their representative status, shown in puns on names, and the stock nature of some gures. The individual is a node of social interaction, rather than a character of deep angst or profound feelings through whom the reader traces her own development. The basic representation of character is this emphasis on its dual ctional and real nature. A close analysis of the structures of the courtesan texts demonstrates the relatively low priority accorded to character in the narratives. The function and development of character in the novels largely supports the claims of the preface writers that these novels were intended to expose and comment on a certain moral situation. This may include undermining that moral stance, and questioning the links between the represented and real universes, but still subordinates character development to the moral framework of plot. This is not just a function

153 Cf. Freadman’s discussion of Altieri’s work, on how society equips us to make complex inferences about it by habituating us to multiple contexts of explanation and interpretation, in Richard Freadman, Eliot, James and the Fictional Self (London: Macmillan, 1988), 9–10.

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of the didacticism, but an inevitable by-product of its conjunction with a milieu-based novel. The clan of stock personalities whose family afnities can be traced across texts supports the view of character as vehicle for an authorial message. Although most of the novels have been read as a form of ctionalised (auto)biography, a re-casting of the author’s previous life or of scenes he witnessed, there is little emphasis on the representation of an analysis of self. In reading character, the caveats of our own subjective position are evident. It can at times be difcult, at our critical and cultural distance, to tell if an author is writing ironically, or as a reection of himself. Reading into a text cannot be avoided, but just as each new text produces a new reading, new readings of character are inevitable if the work is to continue to be relevant. The number of characters in a volume such as Qinglou meng or Haishang hua liezhuan (in fact, all but Huayue hen of the six works foregrounded here) militates against individuation, as does their relative lack of interiority. Characters have to be real enough to be meaningful to a reader, but are still predominantly functional. A reader is unlikely to be moved at the outcome of the lives of the women in Qinglou meng, since we are scarcely introduced to them before they exit. Even a Shuanglin in Fengyue meng fails to garner signicant empathy from a modern reader. Characters who fail to provoke an empathetic response tend to cause more reection on the social situations in which they are found. This is in part an effect of time and distance, but is also rooted in the narrative mode: where characters are aware of their own entextualisation, a reader is not likely to invest so much emotional energy in a self-evidently ctional being. Viewed from the standpoint of relationships, there is little difference between the works labelled romantic and those termed realist: the poverty of relationships is common to both. Traditionally, visiting courtesans was debilitating for male essence, but in these novels it is, with scarcely any exception, shown to be mentally destructive for modern men. Yixiang, the hero of Qinglou meng, becomes a monk, eschewing the world to escape his infatuations; Ziyu in Pinhua baojian divests himself of his beloved actor Qinyan to marry a woman; tragedy awaits the protagonists of Huayue hen; Jia Ming is deserted; and Yuan You dies childless in the penultimate chapter of Fengyue meng. If these characters represent the idealisation of courtesans in ction as a counter to their increasing sexualisation in real life,154 it is a pretty shambolic ideal.

154

Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality, 35.

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The tedium and repetitiveness of the idle brothel lifestyle is well demonstrated, both in the brothel-focused city novels like Jiu wei gui or Haishang hua liezhuan, and in the earlier works set in the gardens of the rich, where smoking and gambling have yet to take over from verse creation or zither strumming. If the illusion of the courtesan is intact at the end of the Qing to a greater degree than critics have allowed, perhaps it never was a portrayal of paradise, but always of broken hearts, a poetry of longing, disease and the complication of family relationships. Jiu wei gui and Haishang hua liezhuan specialise in horric eecing and argumentative and shrewish women, but earlier in Fengyue meng there had been the same compromised portrayal, and even in Pinhua baojian or Qinglou meng we read of brutalised women and suicidal beauties. No matter how many readings critics propose of males happily obsessed with the tragic, or seeing their own sensitivities crushed through their female creations, none of these works present an exactly enviable male position. There are sympathetic male characters, but only the truly evil believe they are getting their own way. If fantasies about marital intimacy are a form of resistance to Confucian patriarchy,155 then delusions about intimacy with courtesans could be construed as a cry against the polygamous marital system and male misconceptions. The position of wives receives a much lower word count, but can be read alongside the tribulations of the courtesans. In assessing courtesans’ lives it can be easy to use as a mental comparator the image of a happy wife, assured in status and respect, but the red-light novels challenge this image. The emotional privation of women’s lives written into numerous Qing texts had clearly ltered through to their writing husbands’ attention. The novels show a much greater sympathy for the position of women in general than has been ascribed to them. A lack of good relations with a spouse obtains in a high percentage of cases, and astute comments on prostitution causing damage to conjugal relations are plentiful. A man can have good and fullling relationship with a beautiful and witty courtesan, but at the cost of other attachments. Non-characters: madams, wives, and ofcials, off-stage actants who govern the sides of life that we do not see of the characters, are important in this. Since we see characters predominantly in relationship with lovers, the ‘unsavoury’ halves of each others’ lives—controlling pimps and madams or overbearing wives, are

155 Mann, Precious Records, 12. On the emotional privation of wives, see Mann, Precious Records, 12–13.

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outside the frame. Their absence ostensibly enables a romanticisation, but also heightens the sense of the unreal. Even in the ‘romantic’ stream of novel, we read into the overwhelmingly narcissistic promotion of the life and self of the male leads unhappy aspects of women’s lives: deaths, illnesses (especially those we would term mental), desertion and marriage out. In the darker side to life depicted, can an awareness of the condition of women be read as a subtle call for social reform, an awakening to parallel that of males awakening from their brothel infatuation? Not many years intervened between the writing of these novels and the emancipation of women in society. A notable lack of success in the aim of ‘rescuing’ women pertains in ction, largely because of the failure of men. Governmental ideals to rescue fallen women through marriage are supported in principle but questioned in practice. Women are represented precisely as wanting marriage above all, tallying with the state discourse, but the male self-interest in this discourse is equally evident. Although the sexuality of the women characters is debated and allowed to form part of an analysis of their character, the tremendous potential for discussing male character in terms of sexual identity is mostly shied away from. Characterisation itself is a highly gendered process. Male and female characters are differently constructed in the texts, differences reecting the social construction of their real-life counterparts. The nineteenth-century courtesan novel altered and redened the possibilities of the literary courtesan by simultaneously enlarging the scope of her activities and narrative possibilities, but stopped short of transferring narrative priority from the client. From the extreme imbalances in numbers and narrative space, as well as in interiority of Qinglou meng, to the much more egalitarian voices and structures of Haishang hua or Jiu wei gui, the male and his reaction to the female remains the focus of the narrative gaze and narratorial voice. Why ban courtesan novels? Presumably because prostitution was illegal, but the novels perpetuate a morality of family life and display the ruination of dalliances, not just in their prefaces but in much of the central story of the novels too. A confusion in ofcial discourse on sex is evident. Sex is problematic in as much as it causes family breakdown if misused,156 but evidence from the Shanghai concessions in the late

156 An 1852 sub-statute prosecuted illicit sexual intercourse, i.e. between prostitutes and customers, but local cases in the 1850s show that their aim was to rescue the

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nineteenth century shows it was rarely a cause of public order problems, and court records indicate both that high-class courtesans and ofcials were de facto exempt from prosecution, and that clampdowns on brothels were spasmodic, with most local ofcials not actively pursuing offences unless cases were brought to their attention. While in the eighteenth century prostitution had been labelled one of the four abominations, with serious consequences for ofcials who failed to detect cases, it is clear that the industry only continued to grow during the nineteenth, regulated at the street level and ever present in newspaper reports and private accounts. The courtesan novels hardly present themselves as counter-cultural: afrming family norms, ridiculing the socially naive, commiserating with the lovelorn, and regarding all women as aspiring to marriage. The novels are more unorthodox in their stance on servile women, and in the attention they draw to the constrained and bitter lives of the debased. The tension between competing portrayals of prostitution, at its simplest between base activity and exalted pastime, is the pivot around which courtesan, client (and author?) form their notions of self in relationship. The paradox of the courtesan—that she threatens family morality and the structure of society, but that she is also a source of delight, aesthetic pleasure and company—remains unsolved, provoking these textual outpourings of uncertainty and self-analysis: part bravura, part apology, part plea for a fair hearing.

woman, punish the pimp, and close the case as quickly as possible; see Sommer, Sex, Law and Society, 292.

CHAPTER FOUR

STRUCTURE: THE TEXTUAL REPRESENTATION OF ITSELF The art of photolithography which has in Europe during the last ten years or so conquered its own province, the reproduction of pictorial works, and which is now universally employed in the printing of illustrations, of manuscripts and of rare old prints, is about to create a revolution in the book trade of China.1 F. Hirth, “Western Appliances in the Chinese Printing Industry,” 1885.

In the physical text of the red-light novel, two processes meet. The rst is the awareness of the text that red-light authors have gone to great lengths to write into their novels: in aspects of characterisation, in the role of the narrator, and in the literary structures discussed below. The second is the actual book, the pages and paper onto which these ctionalising techniques have been inscribed. This chapter considers how these two processes have interacted over time: rstly, how the structuring of narrative in the novels reects a concern with the text as text, and secondly how the new narrative structures in novels in the last decades of the late Qing might relate to changes in external form and in printing media. For a number of novels at the end of the Qing, including Haishang hua liezhuan and Jiu wei gui, a fundamental (but short-lived) presentational change took place: the issue of novels in serials in a pay-as-you-go form. The effects of magazine or part serialisation of novels on both narrative form and readership have attracted less attention than they merit, even though some ‘serious’ novels from the period were issued in this manner.2 If, as some have suggested, the publication of ction in magazine format had an effect on the later writing of narrative, then the form in which novels are

1 F. Hirth, “Western Appliances in the Chinese Printing Industry,” Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. XX Article VIII: 163–177 (1885), 163. 2 For an exception, see Des Forges, “Building Shanghai.”

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printed recasts the very question of narrative structure. The third section of this chapter looks beyond the initial printings of works and the context of the late Qing, to ask how later editions of the red-light novels have edited out or rened the self-referentiality of the text that is such a marked feature of the works. 4.1

Narrative Structures and the Nineteenth-Century Novel

“A great hope for my work,” writes Chen Pingyuan in the preface to his study of narrative change, “is to link up internal literary studies with external studies, to combine purely formal narrative study with the social study of ction which accounts for cultural background.”3 This chapter too has bifocal (though less New Historicist) aspirations. Careful attention to narrative implies that nineteenth-century authors were both aware of, and interested in, how the narrative creates meaning. The rst sections look at how authors structured what they wanted to say, how they understood narrative to create meaning, and how they saw the form of the text as involved in each. This is not a comprehensive survey of structural form (or how the text represents itself as text) across nineteenth-century novels, but draws out those features of narrative which sustain the argument of this book: that an essential aspect of red-light ction is its own sense of ctionality.4 Structure is related as much to aspects of text—to patterns of words on pages, to spaces and blank sections around poetry and drama, and to the arrangements of different types of language within the texts—as to more traditional concerns of content in the gathering and dispersal of characters, or peaks of good and bad fortune. The patterning of the text is integral to the promotion of the ctional world of the story. A deliberate use of eclectic materials suggests a general concern

3 Chen Pingyuan, Zhongguo xiaoshuo xushi moshi de zhuanbian 中國小說叙事模式的轉變 (1987), repr. in Chen Pingyuan xiaoshuo shi lunji (Shijiazhuang: Hebei Renmin, 1997), 250. 4 On aspects of narrative structure in Qing ction such as plot, mode of narration or prologue, see Milena Dolehelová-Velingerová, “Narrative Modes in Late Qing Novels” and “Typology of Plot Structures in Late Qing Novels” in Dolehelová-Velingerová, ed., The Chinese Novel. Commentary is an important aspect of textual structure not considered here, since the relation between commentary editions and narrative would demand at least a chapter to itself. For a volume on the subject in earlier vernacular ction, see David Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary. On commentary and red-light novels, see also my article “Narrating the Passage of Text.”

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among nineteenth-century novelists about how to represent the text to the reader. Similar structural formations recur across works in the use of poetry, dream and drama, and in the deployment of the weather or cyclical celebrations to delineate the chronology of events. None of these are original or unique to red-light novels, but their concentration afrms a heightened conception of textual transmission and its importance in the reception and creation of meaning. The concinnity of drama, drinking games and poetry highlights the textual nature of the novels by distressing the ow of narration and interrupting belief in the narrated world. Representations of the heavens serve a similar function, the ontological presence of the supernatural calling attention to the transience of the textual habitation. In all of these, how the texts are asking to be read reveals much about nineteenth-century thought on the literary function and purpose of writing. Almost every generalising statement on narrative in red-light ction can be negated by reference to a counter-example. The tightly constructed plots of most works described here meet their nemesis in the expanding blockbuster of Jiu wei gui;5 the extensive character lists of many red-light works are offset by the four protagonists of Huayue hen; the tragic outcomes of the more realist works contrast with the happy ending of Jiu wei gui; the grit of the turn-of-the-century is pregured decades earlier in Fengyue meng; commentary-free works sit alongside the heavy dialogue of Zou Tao’s edition of Qinglou meng. If there is any unifying theme in this medley of dystopias, it lies in the ction that the brothel world promotes, and not in any particular means of promotion. Most of the structural features seen in the courtesan novels draw on a long tradition of use in vernacular novels. Features adopted directly from earlier works and commonly present in red-light novels include: the downfall or elimination of the central gure prior to the conclusion; two distinct textual hemispheres charting the rise and fall of the main protagonists; the manipulation of seasonal change; notions of retribution; the division of each hui into two sections following the parallel

5 Jiu wei gui appeared in twelve volumes, 192 chapters, between 1906 and 1910. In a modern edition it runs to 900 pages. The author’s intention had apparently been to stop writing after a standard ve volumes, but he was dissuaded by an eager readership. See Ma Liangchun 馬良春, Li Futian 李福田, General Editors, Zhongguo Wenxue Da Cidian 中國文學大詞典 (Tianjin: Tianjin Renmin Chuban, 1991), Vol. 2, 140.

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couplet headings, and ‘billiard ball’ style shifts in narrative focus.6 What is singular about the structures of Qing red-light novels, to the degree that any generalisation is possible, is a drawing together of different forms and styles of expression into relatively concise narratives.7 The scale of these works is in general much reduced in comparison to the great vernacular narratives of the Ming and earlier Qing, both in terms of number of chapters and, for the most part, character lists. The philosophical scale of the novels is reduced in scope too: these are less examinations of “the interface of human consequentiality and cosmic futility”8 than idle reections on, or futile hopes for, the messes made of minor lives. Where discourses on fate or on qing occur, as in the rst chapters of Pinhua baojian, these are often introduced in terms of a wager on behaviour, or as a competitive classication of acquaintances. This is not to say that philosophical issues are not written into the novels, but that they are often raised in a jocular manner, in relation to the life and specic musings of an individual. Much of the gural recurrence used to build up structural coherence in longer narratives is absent, or reduced in the rapid pace of these shorter texts.9 The numerological signicances of certain chapter numbers, and the clear rhythm of ten chapter units that commentators have seen in Ming and early Qing texts are likewise apparent only in diluted form in the compact scale of red-light works. Though carefully structured, the narrative itself is not usually subsumed into the concerns of structure, which remains subordinate to plot. (That is to say, plot is worked out more in terms of the interactions of characters than the need for certain events to happen in certain chapter numbers, for example).10 In most of the novels, any deliberate compositional 6 On the rise and fall pattern, cf. Dolehelová-Velingerová, The Chinese Novel, 53, where she argues that late Qing novels do not climax halfway through, as in traditional works, but at the end. The novels considered here certainly lose the central protagonist in the main prior to the nal chapter, but are usually brought to some form of denouement (whether that be an enlightened realisation of the error of client ways, or sexual normalisation, or the assuaging of grief ) in the nal chapters. 7 The modal length is forty to fty hui, with outliers such as Fengyue meng divided into only 32 hui, or the much longer work of Jiu wei gui at 192 hui. Compared to the great Ming novels with their relatively standardised hundred hui format, the courtesan novels are much more tightly structured: this is especially notable in unity of scene, and in a uniformly much less extensive character list. 8 Andrew Plaks, The Four Masterworks, 511. 9 See Plaks, The Four Masterworks, 393 and passim. 10 Compare, for example, episodes in the earlier novel Jinghua yuan, where many of the themes of courtesan novels are pregured but whose overarching yin-yang sym-

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patterns that can be traced relate to the regular spacing of recurrent group scenes such as drinking game episodes, but the variable lengths of texts precludes easy cross-correlation of rhythms. Employing a wide range of styles within a text was hardly a new practice: as Plaks wrote of the sixteenth-century novel, this was already a synthesis of developments “drawing upon the aesthetic qualities and techniques of late Ming prose styles and poetics, compositional principles of the pa-ku essay, the informal spirit and rhetorical devices of hsiao-p’in wen and the structural patterns and intellectual attitudes of the literati drama, as well as certain story-telling devices.”11 Ellen Widmer memorably characterised the “potpourri of sources” that feed into the Shuihu houzhuan as “a tissue of borrowings and allusions at every level, from gross structure down to single words, and from all sorts of sources: San-kuo chi yan-i and other vernacular ction, histories wellknown and obscure, the poetry of Tu Fu, Liu Tsung-yuan and others, joke books, travel literature, and pi-chi.”12 The norm for vernacular ction, it would seem, is textual plenitude and a magpie gleaning in composition. The particular ctive creation of material in such modes in the nineteenth century was, however, innovative. This was not just a process of transforming earlier source materials for their metaphoric value or humour, but the fabrication of ction itself utilising eclectic traditional styles. In several red-light novels the textual patchwork becomes metaphor for text. The ironic re-working of source material remained an option for the nineteenth-century novelist, but his main focus in employing borrowed material was in its diffusion of narrative voice and authority. The diverse forms of language found in the novels derive from distinct genres (poetry, drama, wall-hangings) and serve to emphasise the notion of an aggregate text, with its message splintered

bolism and chapter parallelism sometimes guides rather than supports the plot: see Maram Epstein, “Engendering Order: Structure, Gender and Meaning in the Qing novel Jinghua yuan,” CLEAR (Dec. 1996) Vol. 8, 106: “The fact that characters from chapter 36 reappear quite abruptly and seemingly arbitrarily in chapter 66 indicates that parallelism was motivated by structural concerns, not plot.” 11 Plaks, The Four Masterworks, 47. 12 The combination of different narrative forms as a means of highlighting the ctionality of a text was demonstrated centuries earlier in works such as Dong Yue’s 董說 Xiyoubu 西游補, where chantefable and drama are used to present sections of text: See Widmer, The Margins of Utopia (Cambridge, Mass.; Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1987), 5. While the courtesan novels are more subtle in their punning on narrative reality, they follow this use of sundry material to draw attention to the textuality of the narrative.

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into various forms of transmission, converging on the reader. The use of poetry and song serves conventional purposes such as characterisation, commentary or prophetic warning, but also has structural value in breaking up the text and refocusing on the event of narration, and by extension, reading.13 4.1.1

Narrative Drama: The Red-light Novel as Textual Soap-Opera

The red-light novel prior to the last decades of the Qing may be characterised as the dramatic rendition of a multi-dimensional text. The composite structural nature of the earlier courtesan texts is immediately obvious, formed of sedimented generic layers. Like the kaleidoscopic Jin Ping Mei, with its mixture of literary modes, red-light ction incorporated into the story-text numerous citations and textual styles from outside the novel.14 If the late Ming novel formed an “encyclopaedic narrative” promiscuous in its language and textual borrowings, then red-light ction from the Qing lay on a continuum away from this, with works from the mid- to late nineteenth century borrowing poetry and song texts, but those from the very end of the Qing reducing extraneous material. Whereas in the Jin Ping Mei the borrowings were “far from assimilated,” and the novelist akin to an editor, “more interested in showing what he could create from pre-existing texts than in creating his own narrative,”15 red-light works tend to interweave quotation with plot and character. For one recent critic, the extensive re-using of earlier material in the Ming novel Jin Ping Mei should be viewed in the light of contemporary print culture, as a reection of the miscellanies or encyclopaedia (leishu 類書) which gathered together diverse material from a variety of genres, often displaying it in magazine-type juxtapositions, with three strips of unrelated text read together.16 Towards the end of the Qing the links between contemporary print culture and novels again provoke reection, as print processes brandished vibrant new textual forms and the novel emerged re-formatted.

13 Robert Hegel, The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China, 163–4. Monkey ignores the patently ctional nature of this narrative implicit in Xiyoubu’s format, and ctions become fact as the events unfold. The act of creating ction is shown in this short novel as signs are detached from signiers and gures of speech rendered literally. 14 Cf. Wang, Fin-de-siècle splendor, 54. 15 Shang Wei, “Jin Ping Mei and late Ming Print Culture,” in Zeitlin and Liu, eds., Writing and Material Culture, esp. 210, 202–03. 16 See Shang Wei, “Jin Ping Mei,” 188–194.

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Letters, writs, poems and imperial proclamations are interspersed among the prose narrative of the earlier novels, each with its distinct language form and literary conventions. The structural and linguistic heterogeneity of the texts emerges as a dening feature, as the three examples of lists, legal documents, and drama notation demonstrate. In terms of the structure of the main story-text, any dividing line among the novels emerges as essentially chronological, the late two works of Jiu wei gui and Haishang hua liezhuan moving away from this pattern. Although the dramatic structuring of dialogue in these two later works is still evident, there is very little song or poetry in either text, and chapters in Haishang hua conclude, for example, without verse, but in a terse and formulaic 第X 回終, “The End of Chapter X.” This is not to say that there are no intertextual references, since even Jiu wei gui harbours allusions to past courtesans like Du Shiniang or Huo Xiaoyu, and to more recent novels such as Huayue hen or Haishang fanhua meng,17 but that they no longer serve as an organising principle. While poetry is the most abundant form of non-prose text to catch the reader’s eye in the six novels, other writings are also displayed on the page which break up the text. In Qinglou meng, for example, these include a whole page (in a modern edition) of typeface composed of the two characters ping 平 and ze 仄 to show the tone patterns in penta- and heptasyllabic poems, ostensibly as part of a poetry lesson for two of the protagonist Jin Yixiang’s courtesans. The rst example in the lesson is a stanza of heptasyllabic regulated verse (七言律詩式), represented in a manner similar to the following: 平平仄仄仄平平 仄仄平平平仄仄 平平仄仄平平仄 仄仄平平平仄仄

仄仄平平仄仄平 平平仄仄仄平平 仄仄平平仄仄平 平平仄仄仄平平18

There are ve further verses in similar notation. The writing out of this ‘meaningless’ text, rather than summary narration of the events of the occasion, can only demonstrate a belief that the form of the text itself communicates something of its content, giving the reader a more textually enlivened appreciation of events in the narrative. The outcome

17 Fang Youyun, for example, compares his experiences of life with Wei Chizhu in Huayue hen, as if that character were a living being. Jiu wei gui, 41. 18 Qinglou meng, 142–3.

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of the venture is debatable: the effect of a portion of unreadable text is a distancing one, causing the brain to disengage from content as the eye skims over the text. It is difcult to imagine even a reader trained to read by enunciating sounds bothering to ‘read’ through this section. Lists have a similar effect in breaking up the text, such as the enumeration of thirty-six varieties of owers, each alongside a particular courtesan’s name, which Yixiang steals a glance at in the notebook of the old Man in the Moon in the nal chapter of Qinglou meng; or the quatrains ‘appraising’ twenty-four beauties in Chapter Seven; or the several pages of text devoted to a list of the servants that each courtesan has brought with her to a garden party in Chapter 29. In the rst example, the list forms almost a ritual incantation before the thirtysix women return to the ranks of the immortals, and the second is a poeticised form of the ritualised ranking of the ‘owers,’ but the third has no obvious function, other than as a cast-list of the most minor functionaries, some of whom are barely mentioned elsewhere in the text, and to mark the status of a handful of wives or concubines with multiple servants: 吳慧卿帶來: 碧春, 月兒, 春鶯 珠月素帶來: 小燕, 蕊香, 翠珠 章幼卿帶來: 蕖項, 春梅, 碧桃, 小雲 袁巧雲帶來: 霞碧 武雅仙帶來: 六二 何月娟帶來: 蓮蕊, 阿碧19

and so on for several pages (whether in the 1888 or 1993 text): this is only one sixth of the total. Lists ostensibly verify the historicity of the text: thirty-six names identify thirty-six people. A list attests to the perceived power of the written word, and of naming and ranking individuals. In drawing up a name list, Yixiang is both marking and creating the occasion by the inscription, re/presenting the function of

19 Qinglou meng, 112–114. “Wu Huiqing brought Bichun, Yue’er, Chunying; Zhu Yuesu brought Xiaoyan, Ruixiang, Cuizhu etc. etc.”

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the author. Such sections of unreadable text demand that the reader nd a place for them in the narrative. If they cannot be read into the story-text then they must stand as a symbol or component part of the process of inscription, and reect back onto the author, and his reasons for creating a useless list, or perhaps for writing at all. In both Huayue hen and Fengyue meng legal or imperial documents are transcribed into the text, such as the adoption certicate drawn up when Fenglin takes a little girl into her custody to raise as a courtesan,20 the imperial military bulletins posted up outside Hesheng’s army camp in Huayue hen, or the lengthy memorial that Xiao Cen 小岑 submits to the Emperor in the same work.21 The imposition on the text of an ofcialese classical language authenticates the ‘natural’ speech and rhythms of the main narrative and the lives of the characters depicted; it also demands a change of tone of voice on the part of the [oral] reader. Huayue hen and Fengyue meng also incorporate a fully dramatic interlude within the text. In Fengyue meng, this is provided by the one-man performance of a sketch at the courtesan Yuexiang’s birthday celebrations (Chapter Thirteen), where the actor switches between roles by varying his voice from behind a screen. The scene describes a young wife caught by her husband attempting to seduce a novice monk. The sketch is highly amusing for the party guests and the reader, but also enacts a dramatic rendition of the surrounding plot theme, where Yuexiang has just been caught in a compromising position with a young masseur. Spectacle gures prominently in Fengyue meng: in this chapter alone the reader is treated to the intricate visual tapestry of a dragon-boat scene, and to the tricks and skits of a troupe of magicians performing at the birthday party before the main act. While this is not strictly the insertion of other texts, it is a transcription of acts: In a room on the upper oor they moved a square table into the centre, and spread a red felt on it. Two of the entertainers carried a small lacquer tea tray, and covered it with a silk cloth, and put it on the felt. The man stood near to the table and congratulated the birthday girl with a few birthday wishes, and then lifted up the silk cloth. Inside the covering was an upturned ne porcelain teacup. He grasped the base of the cup with two ngers, picked it up and put it on the tea tray. Crossing over his right and left hands, he lifted up the teacup, and inside it was a gold button [indicating ofcial rank]. He again covered up the gold button with the

20 21

Fengyue meng, 253. Huayue hen, 273–4.

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teacup, then saying a few more words picked up the teacup again, and the gold button had turned into a shell pearl one; he then covered the teacup again, and lifted it up again, and the button had changed into a crystal one; again he used the teacup to cover it, and the crystal button turned into an indigo button. He again covered it with the teacup, and it had turned into a large red button. He said: “This is called ascending step by step.”22

The act is repeated, with a witty comment at each major ourish. A few songs and a comic act later, it is the turn of a ventriloquist/ impressionist, who: Holding in his hand a paper fan, rst imitated various magpie noises, together with the noises of a pig, duck, raccoon, and cat, a cock crowing and a dog barking, and followed this with the various noises of pushing a small cart, a large ox-cart and a mule-cart, laden and unladen, up and down. After that he hung up a white silk curtain, and went inside the curtain, and the audience heard two racoons mating. A seventy or eightyyear-old woman was coughing and calling her daughter-in-law. A young woman with a Taizhou accent muttered away to herself: “My old man’s gone off, and hasn’t come back for several days, I don’t know if he’s gone off whoring or gambling, but he’s left me alone in the house . . .”

The conversation between the ‘pair’ of the young and old women carries on for another thousand characters of script, sensory overload continuing as the reader follows the transcription of roles and voices of the solo actor. The drama works well in this scene from Fengyue meng because the reader becomes involved in the sketch: the ction is created that the reader is watching the act directly, rather than viewing the characters’ viewing. Only the ironic reection back to the situation of Lu Shu and Yuexiang deects from the immediate reality of the scene, especially when the young woman of the play sings a ‘Nanjing tune’ for her mother-in-law. This ballad speaks of the universal desire for pleasure at all costs, and of fear for the heart that must turn again after pleasures dissipate. In the 1990s Hanyuan edition of the novel, the poetry is both indented and in bold typeface, and the reader is forced to step back from the scene and take particular note of these words; this is true to a lesser degree in earlier editions, where different script separated dialogue roles. When the voice contortionist reaches the denouement of the sketch, he suddenly reveals himself as a character within the act, and steps outside of the curtain, “he himself making fun

22

Fengyue meng, 134.

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of himself ”23 to general applause and laughter. This cunning twist of self-revelation surprises the reader, the abrupt break between the playact and the ‘reality’ of the birthday celebrations pointing towards the further juncture between the act of reading and the reader’s world. Huayue hen ends with a stage act, complete with notation for the actions of traditional opera characters, all within the dream of the character Guan Shikuan. This play on a scene in the lives of the four lovers (and central protagonists) of the novel at the close of the text is the clearest indicator in any of the works of an understanding of the dramatic potential of narrative. The act also cleverly incorporates a variant on the structural norm for novelistic closure, providing a tuanyuan 團圓 (gathering together) of the four main characters. The fact that this feature, taken from drama, occurs on stage in a dream is both a nice pun, and, as at least one of the four is now dead, a way around logical difculties in plot. Although the transcript of a dream, the section of text has few dream-like qualities, formulated as it is in the format of a drama script. Textually and logically, the script ought to precede, not proceed from the dream, which becomes an inauthentic ction. The tune names of the sung sections of text are given at the head of each speech, but how, and why, Guan Shikuan (or a narrator) would recompose the dream in the form of a drama script, including transcribing the visualised actions into stage directions, is unclear. This is the narration of a dream by a second party: after reading the ornate transcript of his dream we learn that Shikuan is illiterate. Performed as a night play, and full of references to autumn and decay, the score reads as a sad conclusion to the tragic lives of the characters. Puns on the character qiu (秋 autumn, but also chou 愁, sadness), are rife in the dialogue between the fated lovers Wei Chizhu and Qiuhen.24 As the actors reect further on the passing of time and their own ageing, tears replace speech and the banquet is brought to an early close. The dream-drama allows the characters a moment of reection on their lives and unions.

23

Fengyue meng, 139. The character qiu 秋 appears in the names of both of the two female courtesans, in the withered autumn owers and late autumn light; in the Qiuhua Tang where Qiuhen rst met Wei, and in the Qiuxinyuan where the four are gathered on this occasion to appreciate chrysanthemums, as well as in the autumn sounds and shades that ll the courtyard in Wei’s rst aria. Qiuhen makes the link explicit in her spoken sigh: “Autumn owers are lonely and desolate, fallen like my unfortunate life.” 24

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Fig. 4.1

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Drama script within Huayue hen: Guangyi Shuju Xiuxiang Huayue hen 綉像花月痕 edition, juan 4, 52 hui.

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Transposing the themes and characters of the novel into the rareed speech and roles of opera as a nale for the work creates another level of play, of linguistic representation of the consciousness of writing. The antiphonal song and speech, clearly demarcated by character style or size in each edition, parody the text and narratorial comment of the main body of the novel. Even in an early printing such as the 1888 Wu Yu Tian edition, the non-sung interludes of the opera-dream are represented in a separate script style, with movement directions bracketed and the name of the character singing circled. As the actors leave the stage, Shikuan wakes, “thinking ‘Chizhu, Qiuhen—nally someone has written a play,’” and then he thought, “Oh, I’m dreaming, how can I take it as real?”25 before getting up and discovering the book Huayue hen beside his pillow. The chapter was already replete with dramatic action before the opera-dream, with spirit writing of the deceased protagonist appearing on a divining altar. The dream of Shikuan is a visual and audio spectacle, a textual son et lumière, the visually different register emphasising the text within a text. The ‘text’ is not merely the content of the narrative, the singing of the opera characters, but a comment on that narrative. The dramatic nature of red-light texts is central to how we understand the works. This characteristic can be seen in other elements of narrative, such as the predominance of paragraphs, and even whole chapters, that are scene rather than summary. While these draw on traits inherited from earlier vernacular literature, including heavy reliance on dialogue, the dramatising effect is also deeply inscribed in more innovative features of the texts, such as the collective poetry and drinking games scenes. The representation of characters primarily through mimesis rather than diegesis contributes to the screenplay-style narration and profoundly affects the reading of character. Wallace Martin’s discussion of the construction of a dramatic narrative, where the narrator is suppressed and summary replaced by scene is worth quoting at length: If we assume that narrative is the norm and drama the deviation, we get a different view of their relationship and relative advantages. While drama can present scenes and actions economically, it cannot summarize and thus blend in stretches of time not worth enacting; hence its choppy structure . . . The distinguishing feature of narrative—access to the thoughts

25

Huayue hen, 312.

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and feelings of characters, as Blakenburg noted in 1774—is simply missing in drama, unless it is clumsily introduced. Further, drama is usually tied to the lockstep progression of clock and calendar, whereas narrative can treat the human reality of time, dipping into memory for the past when it is relevant to the present, and imagining the future . . .26

Many nineteenth-century narratives display all three of the features assessed as pertinent to drama: a disjointed effect stemming from the use of conventionalised time ellipsis markers; restricted access to the thoughts of characters, with few reexive passages; and, for the most part, a retention of the linear narrative structure of earlier vernacular ction. Other parallels with Chinese drama apparent include a tight unity of place, with action centred on a couple of teahouses or brothels, and the symmetrical plot structures already transported into vernacular ction, with a small cast gathering halfway through and a great assembly at the close of the work.27 Dramatic features are not limited to the earlier novels, though by the end of the century they may have changed in form, and no longer be inserted into text as a separate scene. As Stephen Cheng writes of Haishang hua liezhuan and its author Han Bangqing, “What is remarkable about the novel is that it is all written in this dramatic fashion. Han rarely offers insight into his characters’ thoughts . . . He gives us no survey or assessment of this society, nor does he summarize past events. He willingly accepts the restraints imposed on the dramatist.”28 Though in resolutely continuous prose, Han’s text, for Cheng, is itself drama, the author willingly foregoing description, summary and comment, and limiting himself to the position of a playwright. Though there is no transcription of a dramatic scene within the text, the narrator or characters in Haishang hua liezhuan make reference to over twenty classical plays in the novels, eeting citations sufcient to establish the image for a readership.29 These references carry the memory of intertextual references without the intrusion of new styles of font or typeface.

26 Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 109–110. 27 Structural similarities between earlier novels and chuanqi plays have been noted by several commentators, and provide a check-list for the courtesan novels, see e.g. Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction Commentary, 260. 28 Stephen Cheng, “Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai and its Narrative Methods,” in Liu Ts’un-yan, ed., Chinese Middlebrow Fiction, 135. 29 Cheng, “Sing-Song Girls,” 132.

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The abundance of poetry in pre-1890s red-light novels is immediately noticeable. Even the block printed early texts indent poetry one space from the top of a column, and may leave the remainder of the column blank. The embedded poetry can have multiple functions, and its absence in later works requires compensatory techniques, marking a shift in the structuring of narratives. In comparison to Ming novels, the allusions in most of the courtesan novels are few and less arcane. The song and poetry are usually adapted to the situation, and we see less evidence of deliberate manipulation of scenes or episodes in order to incorporate well-known or other extant song sequences.30 Much of the poetry is original to the novels, and its use by characters is part of the ction of narrative creation, with a notable exception in the song sequences in Fengyue meng.31 The poetry of Huayue hen provides a good starting-point for a discussion of its structural functions. The verse has been described as divorced from the main story of the novel, but as of better quality than the prose: views which downplay the important structural functions that poetry provides in the novel.32 Criticisms of the poetry in Huayue hen quite possibly stem from Lu Xun’s inuential reading, where he writes, “The novel is interspersed with poems and letters, and purple passages tend to obscure the story. Thus Fu Chao-lun commented: ‘The author was a talented poet but a novice in the writing of ction. His most moving passages stem from his appreciation of poetry, and these are melancholy and beautiful. . . .’ Though such praise is not entirely warranted, Fu has laid his nger on the main fault of the novel.”33 The “main fault” of the novel, viewed in terms of its function within the narrative, can be seen as a compositional forte. Huayue hen is saturated 30 Compare P.D. Hanan, “Sources of the Chin P’ing Mei,” Asia Major 10.1: 23–67 (1963), 58; David Tod Roy, “The Use of Songs as a Means of Self Expression and Self-Characterization in the Chin P’ing Mei,” CLEAR Vol. 20: 101–126 (Dec. 1998); also David Tod Roy, “Songs of the Self: Self-expression through Song Lyrics in Jin Ping Mei” in Halfor Eifring, ed., Minds and Mentalities in Traditional Chinese Literature (Beijing: Culture and Art Publishing House, 1999). As Roy writes, Jin Ping Mei is “unique in the history of Chinese ction for the variety of ways it incorporates lyrics of previously existing songs into the matrix of prose narrative,” sung on demand but used by characters as means of communication and self-expression. See “The Use of Songs,” 101. 31 See Hanan, Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 40. 32 Pei Xiaowei, in Ma and Li, eds., Zhongguo Wenxue Da Cidian, 2365; Cheng, “Flowers of Shanghai, 20.” 33 Lu Xun, Xiaoshuo shi lüe, 299. Translation from Lu Hsun, A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, 323.

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with poetry: social occasions such as partings or gatherings are marked with couplets or quatrains; poetry is a major vehicle for the expression of emotion, both private and public, and plays a key function in the progression of plot. The recital of poetry—the majority of poems and almost all examples of lengthy verse are intoned by a named character—highlights the dramatic nature of the text, performed by the characters within the novel. Since even verse where no character is denoted as speaking would be read aloud by a contemporary reader, the aural nature of the text conditions its reception. As with the chapters devoted primarily to the depiction of party gatherings in the brothels or at the homes of the male clients, and characterised by extensive riddles and extempore poetic composition around a theme, chapters where poetry constitutes a high proportion of text are distributed at regular intervals in Huayue hen. Whereas the ‘drinking game’ chapters are clustered in the rst third of the novel, at a periodicity of approximately ve chapter intervals—when the plot has a group focus as introductions and pairings off are constructed (see Chapters 6, 11, 17, 19, 21, 27 for examples of drinking games)—chapters dominated by poetry form the framework of the central section of the novel. Here individual relationships are made and strained, and greater depth of characterisation is attained (‘poetic’ chapters include 23, 25, 29, 31, 33, 41). The regularity of the recurrence of poetic chapters points to a deliberate structure. Poetry permeates the idyllic, removed world of the central chapters, the imagined ‘typical’ setting of a courtesan novel, with its emphasis on qing and depictions of idle lives and nascent relationships, before the prose which describes the outside, real world supervenes. Chapters depicting military exploits and historical sieges during the Taiping rebellion form an end-frame for the novel, and scattered poetry gives way to continuous battle prose in the concluding chapters of Huayue hen. The functions of the poetry can be analysed independently of the quality or message of the verse. Twentieth-century reaction to poetry or song in courtesan novels, captured in the criticism that held it to be “of low interest, vulgar in thought, negative, pessimistic and cynical, performing the destructive function of annulling people’s ambitions,”34 was often driven by focus on its lack of political content in comparison

34 So writes Chen Liao of the verse in works such as Pinhua baojian, Qinglou meng and Huayue hen. Chen Liao 陳遼, “Lun wan Qing xiaoshuo de cige” 論晚清小說的詞歌, Ming Qing xiaoshuo yanjiu 明清小說研究 1997 (2): 188–196, 192.

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to the verse of other late Qing works. Vulgarity and nihilism aside, one of the primary functions of poetry is its elucidation of character, as discussed in Chapter Three above. An important by-product of this method of characterisation is that it obviates the need for constant narratorial character description. Intrusions of the narrator can convincingly be limited to matters of plot and pointing out the occasional coincidence. This downward movement of narrative subjectivity and more decentralised control of meaning has been noted as a force in the evolution of Chinese vernacular ction, although not in the context of an authority imparted via poetry.35 Poetry initiates meetings such as that of the two protagonists of Huayue hen, Han Hesheng and Wei Chizhu, the latter drawn to his contemporary by the quality of his verse gracing a local temple wall. Wei composes an equally poetic reply to await Hesheng’s next temple visit, and the scene is set for a later friendship. The free and unrestrained nature of Hesheng’s character is seen in his verse. An assumed congruence between poetry and character, a strong remnant of the caizi jiaren works, is made explicit by characters in this novel as in many of the more romantic-leaning ones. When the two men nally meet face to face, Chizhu proclaims that they can dispense with small talk, as their souls had already been conversing for some time.36 Poetry denotes an individual, providing a type of personal signature. When out admiring lanterns at festival time, one character catches the strains of a lute being played behind a wall; as he listens he recognises the words as those of a poem Hesheng had sent to Caiqiu, and deduces that it must be her plaintive tune. As an encoding of the identity of another, poetry can be misused, quoting publicly a private context, for example: Chizhu astonishes Hesheng by quoting his own poetry back at him—the recording of a situation of which he could expect Chizhu to have no knowledge. Poetry is a means of historicising events. It marks the past: a past remembered through the poetry composed at the time, and one which can be brought vividly back through quotation of a choice excerpt. In its role as a decorative wallpaper—plaques and Spring Festival couplets bedeck the brothels—poetry serves as a constant physical reminder of the fabric of past lives and as a potential trigger for emotions related 35 36

See Henry Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator, 90. Huayue hen, 69.

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to the disjunction between past and present (compare the evocative nature of modern pop lyrics for many). Much of the import of poetry within the text derives from this capacity to stimulate and inuence emotions: characters are frequently moved to tears by the rendition of a poem, usually expressing pain at thwarted love or the vagaries of fate, and choked to the point of not being able to continue reading—even in cases where the character reading out loud is the author of the verse. The power invested in poetry can be manipulated by characters: Hesheng uses heart-wrenching couplets to apply pressure on Caiqiu to remain with him and not travel to her ailing parents, in a form of emotional blackmail.37 Poetry, through its distancing effect, gives voice to personal sentiments which the characters might have difculty expressing directly, and mitigates the still unresolved problem of how to deal with reported speech mediated through the ever-present narrator. Poetry has ofcial functions within relationships, enacting the sealing of emotions and the consolidation of relationships in the sending of a dingqing 定情, ‘fastening of the emotions’ poem, which afrmed a new stage in a client-courtesan relationship and denoted a transfer to a monogamous coupling. The issue of women and poetry is of more than incidental interest in the red-light texts, with poetry used in the novels to show the constructed nature of gender roles. Poetry is a measure of intellectual worth, and therefore of equality. Women versed in poetry are able to transcend the connes of their gender and take part in ‘male’ activities such as composition during drinking games. A combination of self-exclusion—“Why bother with all this thinking—let’s just drink” complains one of the minor females in Huayue hen as she and another courtesan elect to play guessing ngers during the drinking bouts—together with male condescension, serve to remove all but the most tenacious women from the preserve of poetry.38 Women are often used as scribes when the urge to compose takes hold of one of the men. Qiuhen and Caiqiu frequently perform this function for their lovers, though both are capable poets. Caiqiu, in an early effort to better herself, demands nightly poetry lessons of Chizhu. The hesitancy with which she offers her work for appraisal and the modesty she portrays, claiming that

37 38

Huayue hen, 160. Huayue hen, 134.

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praise for her work is only because she is female, displays the gender affectation of characters. One of the most extensive sections of poetry composition or exposition which appears in Pinhua baojian is in one of the few ‘women’s’ or ‘wives’ chapters (Chapter 54). As in other texts, poetry and riddles are a prime area for mediating the relationships between male and female characters (or, in this novel, the masculine and feminine), and in many senses the absence of poetry from the later novels removes an important means of approaching the women. The ladies have congregated at Qionghua’s 瓊華 to congratulate her on the examination success of her ancé Ziyu, and nd poetry books lying around her in her room.39 A protracted discussion of the relative merits of women’s poetry follows. The wives are markedly self-deprecatory about their own work and literary ability and full of praise for each other. They list their favourite poems—to show that women have read across the whole range of the Tang oeuvre, or to demonstrate a particularly feminine selection?—before Qionghua launches into a lengthy exposition of her views. A feature of red-light narrative which stands out because of its divergence from contemporary creative writing theory is the predominance of ‘tell’ not ‘show’ in terms of narration, but its reversal in the curious amount of textual ‘show’: inserts, poem titles, songs, and so on are all fully transcribed for the reader. Not all of the novels labelled ‘romantic’ have such a heavy dose of poetry. The music and poetry of Chen Sen’s Pinhua baojian form a less important part of the lives of characters and of the structure of the novel than in other early courtesan works, though they perform similar functions: to provide comment on character, to delineate relative intelligence and skill, and to describe and provoke emotions. In a novel which makes such a structural distinction between high and low characters, poetry reading is clearly a ‘high’ pursuit, and large gatherings of congenial friends mandate some form of poetry recital or drinking game. The poetry of Pinhua baojian is more ornamental and incidental—such as couplet composing on the occasion of a birthday—than in Qinglou meng or Huayue hen. Poetic interludes and long descriptive scenes, the latter common to both the ‘realist’ Fengyue meng and ‘romantic’ Pinhua baojian, distance the narrative and reify the text. The poetry of red-light

39

Pinhua baojian, Chapter 54.

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novels cannot be thought of as merely superuous ornament, which can be excised from translations because it would be “unwieldy and laboured in translation”40 as Eileen Chang has suggested, or because the double-entendres are not easily rendered into another language. This policy, which requires editing out large sections of narrative, blithely overlooks the structural function of verse within the narrative (as well as decades of translation and textual theory). In Pinhua baojian as in Huayue hen, poetry composition allows characters, and the author, to demonstrate talent, to each other and the reader. Just as female prostitutes or wives in other novels demand teaching from their regular clients or husbands, a teacher-disciple relationship evolves around poetry between several of the young nobles and their boy-lovers in Pinhua baojian. After initial teasing at the outset of a relationship, the boy actors begin to be invited out along with their partners and treated as a pair. Chunhang began his relationship with Huifang out of physical attraction, but this passes through a monetary involvement to a deep comradeship. Times of friendship are spent explaining poetic allusions or playing the qin, as when Chunhang and Huifang are together in Chapter 14, with Huifang intoning verse after verse and commenting on the allusions or structures for the younger boy.41 Drinking games provide further opportunities for poetry lessons: even the best boys have only a mediocre skill at composition, and are unsure of their quotations from the classics, putting them at a similar disadvantage to the females in other red-light novels. By comparison, alongside the downgrading of poetry in Jiu wei gui (1906–10) is a total absence of music. These two features, which create much of the dramatic character of the earlier courtesan texts, signal an evolution both in narrative form and in the world of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century brothels. The representation and the reality have undergone change since a few decades previously,

40 Eileen Chang, explaining her decision to remove the prologue, epilogue and poetry from her translation of Haishang hua, “Sing-song Girls of Shanghai” in Liu Ts’un-yan, ed., Chinese Middlebrow Fiction, 96. 41 The male nobles of Pinhua baojian are depicted as adept at lute-playing and operatic singing and can both appreciate and accompany the trained boys. This coheres with earlier practices, when many patrons were skilled in the same arts, such as story-telling, as those they hired. (See e.g. the case of the seventeenth century Mo Houguang 莫後光, given in Li Yanshi 李延昰 Nan Wu jiuhua lu 南吳舊話錄, repr. in Huating Jiang Jie 華亭蔣烈, juan 21: ‘jituo bu’ 寄托部. I am grateful to Rüdiger Brener for this reference.)

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when the vestiges of scholarly leisure could still be described without resorting entirely to nostalgia. Concomitant to the absence of poetry is the lack of drinking game scenes. In place of these static, diversionary scenes of poetry and riddles in novels which follow a strictly linear narrative ordering, are shifts in narrative time, and the interweaving of biographical tales into the text. Prolonged instances of analepsis and ‘story within a story’ diversions in Jiu wei gui serve as a prose equivalent of the static poetry or riddle scenes, prolonging suspense and retaining an interest in the plot outcomes of the main storyline. More profound narration of motivation and desire also substitutes for one of the main functions of the poetry in earlier works. Coupled with a more realistic depiction of brothel life in Jiu wei gui is an acuity in depicting the psychological state of the characters. This is not so much access to their inner thoughts, which was commonplace in earlier works, but an exposing of motive and duplicity. The unmasking of characters’ inner and outer feelings and their self-conscious role-playing is deftly narrated. Qiugu and Yuelan’s 月蘭 relationship is an excellent example of this: at the outset each is shown to have their own agenda for the relationship and be less than transparent with the other, and when both desire to separate, each fools the other in a complicit deceit, thus saving face and parting on amicable terms.42 Sporadic drinking scenes remain in Jiu wei gui (e.g. in the 10th, 11th, 17th, 30th hui), but these no longer resemble the debauched, but highly literary, occasions of poetry creation, criticism and enjoyment in previous works, where both courtesan and client sought to display erudition and win recognition, and are merely occasions for social gatherings or gambling sessions. The exclusion of reams of poetry and riddles from the text accompanies a movement towards the promotion of an explicitly ctional narrative, in association with the removal of narrative frames describing the receipt of the physical text by the narrator. It also signals a weakening of group sociability. The more individualised lifestyle of the late Qing work is apparent, depicting an incipient atomisation of society. The locus of social activity in Jiu wei gui is no longer primarily a group of friends in a teahouse, and the main coterie of acquaintances in this section of the novel, clustered around the character Qiugu, remains loose and ill-dened. This dovetails with narrative: no longer structured around group dynamics, the story-thread follows incidents related to

42

Jiu wei gui, 15, 23.

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the lives of main characters in turn. Without communal gathering and group scenes, fewer opportunities for social poetry arise. 4.1.3

Drinking Games

“The novel cannot deal easily with group action, on which political change depends—or even group discussion” writes David Lodge;43 but it is precisely group discussion at which much red-light drama excels and it is in the drinking game scenes, where up to eight or ten voices interact, that the liveliest characterisation occurs. The basic formulae for drinking game riddles vary little across the texts, irrespective of decade or location, showing their use as literary device rather than transcripts of actual or potential games. The games function to entertain and test the reader, and to delineate the relative standing of characters within the group and relationships among them. Puns and puzzles, which characters have to solve at lantern festivals and such occasions, demand effort from the reader if the message of the book is to be understood, in the same way as the narrator’s commentary draws moral judgements from us.44 A brief comparison of three such scenes from Fengyue meng, Pinhua baojian and Huayue hen shows the similarities in structural function of these repeated scenes across novels, and across the realist/romantic divide. Full pages of text read more as drama script than narrative: Chapter Seventeen of Huayue hen provides an excellent example, dominated by rapid-re speeches, separated only by stage direction-style explanations of action. The narrator is all but effaced as the drinking interlude progresses. A typical gathering of courtesans and clients in one of the elegant brothels is underway, with all present mutual acquaintances. Some of the women tune each other’s lutes and the men play chess: it is already late when the banquet begins. The seating arrangements are meticulously detailed, and friendly banter about the quality of calligraphy on the wall-hangings occupies the guests. Chizhu suggests a drinking game, and a guest comes up with one where characters must be thought up with identical left and right halves, which can also stand as words in their own right. Qiuhen misses the point and blushes at her incorrect guesses, but immediately afterwards another sing-song girl, Caiqiu, is praised for her contribution. Comparisons

43 David Lodge, After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990), 20. 44 Cf. Katherine Carlitz, The Rhetoric of Chin P’ing Mei, 71.

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between the two lead females are frequently made in the novel, but during drinking games humiliations are immediate and public. Wine and more dishes follow before Caiqiu introduces a game, and calls for drinking chips to be brought, reassuring Qiuhen that it is a game we [women] can take part in. This game consists of linking together and rhyming correctly song words from the play Xixiang ji (Tale of the Western Pavilion) containing the character ‘phoenix’ (鳳) with a tune name and a quotation from the Shijing (Classic of Poetry). Incorrect rhymes result in alcohol nes and particularly elegant or owing lines are toasted. After each successful line, a further quotation of poetry, containing the words ‘mandarin ducks’ is cast out as a ‘ying goblet’ line to determine the next player. Qiuhen expresses anxiety at having to produce a quotation from the Shijing; her consternation amuses the others but tallies with the later cry of one of the men present: “This isn’t a drinking game, it’s an exam” as the games become increasingly competitive. He is shown no mercy: “Hurry up and hand your paper in, then” another character rejoins, the same complaint repeated verbatim in similar scenes throughout red-light novels. Adherence to the rules of drinking games is strict: Chizhu is ned ten cups of wine for offering to substitute for his lover Qiuhen. He is in his turn a hard master, ning a scholar for being pleased at his own efforts, and pointing out that Qiuhen’s inection rhyme is incorrect, though the other males plead clemency for her. Qiuhen’s response to this is deemed entirely inappropriate: she produces a starter line where the pair of mandarin ducks are lovers in a tomb, and an omen-laden, embarrassing silence ensues. As the next ier is sent, Qiuhen fears that it has fallen again to her to perform, but Caiqiu laughs, “Sister Qiuhen, the ‘duck’ character fell to me.” The dramatic scope of the scene is ripe, but tone in a written text is almost impossible to determine. Many of Caiqiu’s comments could be construed as barbed or condescending, but could equally be friendly encouragement, such as “Sister Qiuhen really is intelligent, it’s a pity no-one has taught her, if someone were to give her a little guidance, there’s nothing she couldn’t do!” With little indication of the reception of comments from the narrator, the reader must construct her own reading of such a scene. Seven or eight such drinking game scenes are presented in the novel Huayue hen. Although they are in essence static, diversionary scenes where tension is relieved and plot development is halted, an intellectual parallel to the scenes of minor, comic characters in Shakespearean tragedies, our knowledge of characters may be deepened through their poetic

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interactions. For the duration of the scene, the reader—and the characters—forget about pressing events outside: nancial, conjugal or military. The occurrence of such passages across the range of earlier courtesan works shows how this comes to feature as a structural norm. Unlike the poetry scenes, drinking games episodes are relatively immediate in their referentiality, an instant take on characters or events, rather than echoing or foreshadowing other events throughout the text. The dynamic nature of drinking game narrative is well illustrated by a scene in Chapter Seven of Fengyue meng, where male and female voices interact antiphonally to create drama of innuendo and layered meaning. The drinking game scenes are clustered early on in the novel, at that pleasant stage where friendships are being formed; once decline and destitution beckon such frivolities lessen. During the prelude to the drinking games proper, the scene is set in the courtesan Guilin’s boudoir, where the assembled friends are chatting idly, eating melon seeds and smoking opium pipes. Yuexiang irtatiously passes an opium contraption from her mouth directly to her lover’s, and Guilin tries to persuade another courtesan to inhale a mouthful, just for fun. A stock buffoon character is present, Mu Zhu 穆竺, a country relative, who is scared by the ticking and chiming of a clock (drawing heavily on Liu Laolao 劉姥姥 in Honglou meng) and who serves as the butt of general laughter when an old madam perceives his extreme discomfort at being seated at lunch between two attractive courtesans and offers to match-make for him. The girls play guessing ngers games, imbibing when they lose a round, or singing a song as a ne. The addict Wu Zhen is bored with this and proposes a drinking game, but wonders whether the women can be included. In this as in other novels, such rounds are a testing ground for perceived intellectual ability, and for treading out malefemale positions. Contrary to critics’ perceptions of the romantic novels, and unlike the caizi jiaren works, few of the women in any of the red-light works possess an education and intelligence to challenge the men, though the suggestion is prevalent that given training several of the women could partake on an equal footing.45 A solution to Wu’s problem is proposed where the men produce a verse, based on a nickname from the Shuihu zhuan, a quote from the Four Books and one from Xixiang ji, and their respective courtesans then sing in turn.

45

Cf. Henriot, “Chinese Courtesans in Late Qing” and discussion above.

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Wu begins the round, and the ritual praise for his composition is followed by a song from Guilin which he dismisses as too commonplace. It is not only the women who are intellectually feeble in this novel of lower-level functionaries. Wei Bi, one of the ve friends, later confuses his quotation from the Ernü jing with one from the Four Books, and gets his character from the Shuihu zhuan wrong. As penance, he tells a long joke, having ensured that his audience were listening carefully in the traditional story-telling manner.46 Fenglin is the next to sing, and initiates a series of songs where the women refer obliquely to themselves and their situations: Fenglin’s verse speaks of grief and the self-sacrice of a woman for her lover. Shuanglin’s eternal love song concludes with the line “I don’t know if you are willing or not?” which the others read as a plea to her long-term client Yuan You. Latent fears surface when Yuexiang sings plaintively: “I can’t remember the early days of our love, when you loved me and I loved you . . . who would have known you would cast me off mid-way.” For this atmosphere-dampening contribution she is ned, Wu protesting that her paramour Lu Shu’s love can hardly be that ckle. Yuexiang agrees to sing another song as a ne but her unwillingness to repent is vindicated by future events as her lover indeed deserts. That other characters are conscious of the self-reexivity of the women’s songs shows that we can identify the emotions of the women with the lyrics, which are not entirely ironic or conventionalised self-delusions.47 Plot, omen, song and tension between characters interact in this delicately constructed scene. Drinking games accompany each major gathering of the elite in Pinhua baojian, for, as Cixian indicates, the two are contingent: “Today we have an elegant gathering, we can’t be without a drinking game.”48 The nature of the games in the novel varies around the set pattern, with Tang poetry quotations, character composition games, drinks, nes, and mutual congratulations. In Pinhua baojian we see the occasional

46

“Xian gui” he begins, “I am attempting that for which I am untted,” to which the audience reply in unison “We have washed our ears and are listening attentively.” 47 Cf. Carlitz, The Rhetoric of Chin P’ing Mei, 116–20 on Jin Ping Mei, where much of the drama and song produce an incongruity between speaker and sentiments and are thus used as satirical comment. The long records of one or two women’s laments in the narratives of their lives that appear in Fengyue meng in sections of prose dialogue, and which are evidently to be read sympathetically, inform our reading of their appropriated poetic voices. 48 Pinhua baojian, 281.

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novelty, such as the ‘voice-activated’ automatic wine cup brought out to the table, which turns out to have a magnetic gadget afxed to the base, and will move towards whomever it is directed. The innovative nature of the era and the delight in new gadgetry and novel food dishes introduces an element of modishness to background society, much discussed in relation to the later Shanghai works. Drinking scenes are inevitably repetitious, as each character in turn has to produce a set poem to a theme, and formulaic apologia and self-abasements are rife, such as the “Fortunately I recall a line . . .” which appears verbatim two or three times within one round. Complex rules and variations, with the odd well-crafted phrase or ne spark of wit, enliven the scenes, delighting characters and, presumably, readers. Not all readers were evidently enthralled: David Der-wei Wang describes the artistic defects of the novel, in its “wooden narrative, at characters, tedious descriptions of parties and wine games.”49 In some chapters, separate games run parallel with an easier version initiated for the boys, for whom, as for the women of other texts, remembering an appropriate quotation with correct rhyme and tonal inection is difcult in more obscure texts. Some of the games, especially those favoured by the boys, revolve around adding or removing a stroke to a given character and creating a new one. Such playful, childish games underscore the innocence of the young boys. Drinking games here function as a type of linguistic stroking exercise, an excuse to delight in each others’ talent and collectively to assert enjoyment of morally high pursuits. 4.1.4

Macro-Structure: End Frames, Disjunctures, and the Supernatural

The framing devices of the ‘found text’ and the ‘disappearing author’ and their use in drawing attention to the relationship between narrator, text and author have been discussed above. A prime function of the frame in red-light novels lies in its construction of the ctive setting of the narrative, the disjuncture between the outer frame and the inner real world of the story-text problematising a straightforward reading of the world of the novel. There is another form of frame in use in several of the novels too, in the creation of other-worldly realms within the text. These ‘supernatural frames,’ dominant in the earlier works, often come to the fore towards the end of a novel, revealing one of 49 David D.W. Wang, “Edifying Depravity: Three Late-Qing Courtesan Novels,” in Eva Hung, ed. Paradoxes of Traditional Chinese Literature, 233.

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their main uses: to conclude a story which is beginning to trip over its own plot. The authors frequently make virtue of necessity, and the supernatural adds to our understanding of gender and of ctionality in the narratives. The end-frame includes the opening ci (詞) poem of the novel, where present, and usually the rst chapter of the novel. The opening poem is only retained in Fengyue meng and Qinglou meng, and in both cases it is aligned with the voice of the preface writer, but jars with the sensibilities of the central story. The ci with which Fengyue meng begins includes the couplet: Yesterday a solemn and enduring pledge of delity/Today all scattered to the winds, A hundred instances of goodness or love all come to nothing/Romance was ever a dream,50

which is the ostensible setting for the novel, but which is not entirely borne out by events in the narrative. A disparity in outlook between frame and story invites the reader into an awareness of the constructed nature of the novel, just as the expressive differences between the prologue and rst chapter of Shuihu zhuan “awaken the reader to the distinction between reality known from experience and ways of speaking about it.”51 In Fengyue meng the life-course of certain of the characters conrms the warnings of the preface, such as the acrimonious break-up of the lovers Jia Ming and Fenglin, described in Chapter Three above. Friction between the male-centred preface perspective and the central chapters is played out throughout the narrative, leaving the reader to determine how much the storyline refers back to the author’s framing of the book. Was Fenglin obliged to break with Jia, in order to prove the perdy of prostitutes? If so, does this negate the social signicance of her actions, a pawn in a chess game with a predestined male victory? Male victory is a moral one in Fengyue meng and as such rather hollow, as

50

Fengyue meng, 15. Deborah Porter, “Setting the Tone: Aesthetic Implications of Linguistic Patterns in the Opening Section of Shui-hu chuan,” CLEAR 14: 51–75 (December 1992), 66. As Hegel points out, this discrepancy in Shuihu zhuan was entirely predictable, given that the rhetorical stance of the narrator and preface involved conrming the dominant social values of a lowest common denominator Confucianism, but the degree of difference requires the reader consciously to compare the two in order to comprehend the work. See Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 147. 51

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the women escape back or move on to better lives outside of prostitution. The ‘disappearing woman’ syndrome of May Fourth literature is pregured spectacularly, as each of the main female characters absent themselves in turn. “The business of a literary critic,” writes one such critic, “is to examine a literary work for traces of the ideologies which shape it . . . and to point to discrepancies between what the work purports to tell and what a careful reading of it shows.”52 Fengyue meng describes four female courtesans who desert or renege on their commitment to their patrons and lovers, and one who commits suicide upon the death of her husband and is mostly praised for the act. The ve males are left dead, ill with syphilis, exiled or distraught after their encounter with the prostitutes. The women of this novel are strong-willed and gain advantage through desertion, extortion and betrayal. As with Defoe’s whore Moll Flanders, “the concealed message here is: do what you will to them, they survive.”53 This social salvation is remarkable in that it is not male-orchestrated, but stems from the women themselves, presenting a reading of the novel as an injunction to males not to tamper with the stronger sex. While we might not agree with Yeh’s description of Shanghai courtesans at the turn of the century as “a new breed of independent professional”54 (genuinely independent from clients, patrons and madams?), it is clear that even fty years earlier there was a view that championed the ultimate decision-making autonomy of the courtesans. At the close of Fengyue meng the slightly deranged Guo Lairen reappears among the crowds, clapping his hands and singing a ditty about the entrapments of the brothels and his own escape. This gure provides supernatural input and, in his association with the author from the opening frame chapter of the novel, a link to the reality outside the ction of the novel. Fengyue meng is not the only ‘realist’ novel to employ internal frames; in Haishang hua liezhuan the same effect is realised through characters’ dreams, which function as a warning to the reader of their

52 K.K. Ruthvan, Feminist Literary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 32. 53 Gillian Beer, “Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past,” in Belsay and Moore, eds., The Feminist Reader, 63. 54 Yeh, Shanghai Love, 82. Women’s salvation, meanwhile, has been described as an obsession of Chinese intellectuals since the turn of the twentieth century, but has much deeper roots. Cf. Lu Tonglin, ed., introduction to Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), 3.

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insubstantiality. Characters, virtuous in dream, may start to take reality as a dream, in a scenario where “realism and fantasy are confused at every level.”55 In other novels an extra-ctive reality within the text is more fundamental to the structuring of the narrative. Qinglou meng, that fantasy of the polygynist utopia, a “world in which a benevolent and potent polygynist (who is also usually a landlord, merchant, exam candidate or ofcial) enjoys the assemblage of wife (usually of the same or higher class) and concubines who are beautiful, sexy and not jealous,” is encrusted with a marked Daoist overlay.56 In the rst chapter of Qinglou meng, Jin Yixiang saw the vision in a mirror of thirty-six trees, each with a female immortal beneath. Only in the nal chapter of the novel are the women purged of the dust of the earth and their worldly sentiments, and allowed back to the ranks of immortals. Since Qinglou meng covers a span of over twenty years and two generations, the Daoist themes which are prominent only in the nal four chapters of the novel could be dismissed as a convenient device of closure, but they do force a revision of any reading of the text. As an account of the lives of female courtesans, the nal chapters diminish the poignancy of the récit, rendering absurd the set-up of the novel (and making a more signicant point, mocking ction and authorship). By providing the happy ending of a reunion and chaste safe haven in paradise, the author has cast the women’s suffering as all but meaningless, mere dream-memories of the lower, earthly realm. The supernatural permeates texts in dream and symbol as well as in the apparition of divine beings in the framing structure. Omens may reassure characters or predict the future, such as the auspicious carp which turns its course at Ziyu’s behest in Pinhua baojian to indicate that his lover Qinyan will soon return to the capital. The supernatural also emerges in more subtle forms in Chen Sen’s novel, in the comments of local dignitaries who note that the close resemblance between Ziyu and Qinyan portends troubles for them in the future.57 The heroes’ ability to cause each other such pain and grief is an indicator both of the depth of qing each is capable of, and of the predestined nature of their union.58 That the couple have a special relationship is demonstrated in

55

Wang, Fin-de-siècle Splendor, 98. McMahon, Misers, Shrews and Polygamists, 7. 57 Pinhua baojian, 126. 58 Sulan is one of the rst to posit this: “You two really did have some relationship in a previous life” he suggests, p. 136. The supernatural nature of Qinyan’s beauty which 56

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three signicant instances: by Ziyu’s guessing of Qinyan’s riddle and winning a qin instrument, by the pair’s unique ability to rhyme each other’s couplets in poetry recitals, and by Ziyu being the one to fathom out the meaning imparted to the symbolic medicines Qinyan leaves behind when he journeys south. The taking over of a credible narrative by supernatural means as a way of tying up the story is evident in Pinhua baojian, as in Qinglou meng. While both of these two works represent a more traditional stream of courtesan novels, others of the more romantic type do not resort to the insertion of a supractional world within the novel, and elements of supernatural intervention are also present in the supposedly realistic works. In the nal quarter of Pinhua baojian the supernatural begins to intervene visibly, in a deus ex machina closure. In Chapter 45, Ziyu is forced to buy an expensive set of books from an old pedlar, and keeps him around his compound as the man claims to be skilled at planchette divination. The pedlar’s ‘predictions’ are tempered for the reader by the admission that he has prior knowledge of all those present, and most of the revelations relate to past lives of characters. A narrative ambiguity is maintained throughout the séance scene, which provides a denouement to the novel three-quarters of the way through. The writing of the god is so cursive that only the pedlar Wang can make it out clearly, although authenticity is restored when the two boys holding the divination sticks each accuse the other of ‘writing,’ then both deny their own involvement. Most of those present are in no doubt that the revelations could only have come from a god, because of the degree and nature of knowledge encoded in the verse. The dramatic nature of this revelatory scene is readily evident, with spiritual poetry and suspense working in tandem. As Wang (or the spirit) calls people to go forward and receive a message, the men and boys wait for their names to be announced. Many of the characters are delighted at the spiritual associations revealed through the divination, which conrm extant earthly unions between the young nobles and the boy-actors. The most shattering revelation is that Qinyan in his past life was the daughter of the scholar Qu, and the scene approaches farce as the pair stare at each other, dumb-struck, and all present x their eyes on the

distinguishes him from other people is noted by several characters in the text. Lord Hua comments of him that “it seems as if he has immortal bones, almost as if he is different from other humans.” Pinhua baojian, 207.

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reincarnated daughter. When a respected scholar is led to the girl’s burial place by Qinyan, the sceptic truly believes: “This really is an immortal spot. I never used to believe in tales of gods and immortals, but having seen it with my own eyes today, I cannot but believe.”59 The implicit voice of the narrator leaves the supernatural framework intact, and the reader is invited to suspend belief. Where plot is so heavily dependent on a supernatural presence and intervention, the emphasis is less on the text’s questioning of its own construction, than on a pre-digested and narratorially sanctioned second level of reality. Supernatural reality is evidently a different mode of presentation of ctionality than through a disparate frame and story, or through narratorial unreliability, but can be read as a means to the same end. The story of Pinhua baojian or Qinglou meng is unable to be contained within the earthly world of the text, just as the story of Huayue hen or Haishang hua liezhuan needs a frame to contain it and comment upon it. Both means point to the distance between transmission and what is transmitted, to the ction of the reality read into the novel by the reader. 4.1.5

Romantic/Realist Distinctions

Recent writings on red-light ction from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have considered structure in parallel with the question of textual grouping, or genre. Patrick Hanan has determined a two-stream division among courtesan novels between ‘romantic’ and ‘realist’ works. Catherine Yeh and Alexander Des Forges are among those concentrating on the ‘Shanghai novels’ who have seen an entirely separate genre in these works, where “the courtesan and the city are in a literary embrace,” with the city itself a major character and implied subject of the ction.60 Genres are mutable and uid, and like Venn

59

Pinhua baojian, 499. See Patrick Hanan, “Fengyue meng and the Courtesan Novel,” Harvard Journal of Asian Studies 58): 345–372 (Dec. 1998); Des Forges, “Street Talk and Alley Stories” esp. Chapter Three; Yeh, Shanghai Love, esp. Chapter Six. Quotation from Yeh, Shanghai Love, 249. These three scholars all see Fengyue meng, set in Yangzhou, as a precursor to the Shanghai city novels. When Yeh writes: “The fundamental structure shared by all the courtesan novels is the city,” and comments on the “group of novels” that Lu Xun discusses from the point of view of morality and David Der-wei Wang from the perspective of narrative (p. 9), it is clear that she is only looking at the turn-of-thecentury Shanghai-based novels, although Lu Xun’s list includes Qinglou meng, Pinhua baojian, and Huayue hen. The latter two are also discussed by Wang, and none of the three feature the city prominently. 60

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sets, membership of any given sub-group does not have to exclude a work from the wider corpus of red-light novels. Jiu wei gui, for example, has been categorised as a novel about ofcials, and this is not precluded by its red-light or Shanghai context.61 While the many courtesan novels set in Shanghai which appeared in the 1890s and 1900s have mutual afnities and original features, they also share a good deal of their structural and textual DNA with earlier red-light ction. Since it is boundaries which dene difference, viewing narrative structures across a chronological span of sixty years enables changing styles and innovative forms to be identied more clearly. The distinction between romantic and realistic red-light works has been based sometimes on content and, less frequently, on narrative style, with the idealised type allied to caizi jiaren works, and the more realistic to the cautionary novel. These two streams, which at the most basic level equate to a tragic/comic binary depending on the outcome of the principal relationships or encouplings in the novels, place Fengyue meng and Haishang hua liezhuan in a separate category to Pinhua baojian, Qinglou meng and Huayue hen (with Jiu wei gui left aside after general acceptance of error in Lu Xun’s chronology of categories). This notion of two categories of courtesan novel, differentiated by intertextual borrowings as well contextual factors such as a city setting, has been advanced most cogently by Patrick Hanan,62 who claims that although both types share features such as a contemporary setting and allegiance to Honglou meng, they are separate streams with little interaction. Such ideas have also been put forward by scholars working on individual novels, especially in relation to Han Bangqing’s Haishang hua liezhuan, though prior to Hanan’s work on Fengyue meng this had often been lauded as an entirely new concept in the courtesan novel. David Der-wei Wang writes, for example, that Haishang hua liezhuan does not read like the courtesan novel we generally know, and that its life-like atmosphere should be seen as an “effect of the real” which

61

See Chen Pingyuan, Chen Pingyuan xiaoshuo shi lunji, 1422; Jean Duval, “The Ninetailed Turtle,” 185. Chen argues that Jiu wei gui is in essence a ‘Buttery’ ( yuanyang hudie pai) novel translated across into the brothels, with Qiu Gu an antithetical hero. For Chen, the novel follows in the expository-warning mode of Guanchang xianxing ji, but set in the brothel world rather than ofcialdom, and unlike other revelatory works sharing a heritage of traditional chivalric and of detective ction. 62 In a paper to the 1998 AAAS Conference entitled “The Rise of the Courtesan Novel in Nineteenth-Century China,” as well as in Patrick Hanan, “Fengyue Meng and the Courtesan Novel,” 345–46.

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“arises as the novel pits itself against the narrative conventions of the courtesan novel.”63 These effects of verisimilitude are present earlier than Wang allows, in Fengyue meng, as Hanan has demonstrated, and are not entirely conned to the romantic stream. Whether Haishang hua liezhuan is qualitatively different from earlier works in the laws of verisimilitude operating through its narrative structures is debatable. As will be evident from previous chapters, it is scarcely tenable to claim on the basis of content that the characters of the romantic works are all stereotypes and paragons of virtue or intelligence. Even in the ultraromantic Pinhua baojian and Qinglou meng, moral ambiguity abounds, and the novel Huayue hen, categorised alongside these two, ends in bitter separation and death. What is of note, is that a close study of the narrative methods of the two streams does not conrm these distinctions, or account fully for the similarities in range and use of structural motifs across the series of texts. The notion that the two types “prove to be associated with fundamentally different kinds of ction,”64 needs examining not just in the light of source materials but in the uses made of that transplanted material in its new assemblage. In creating either ‘romantic’ or ‘realistic’ ction, the authors have often employed the same narrative tools to make credible that ction, and transmit it to the reader. Within each type, there may also be wide divergence in the mode of presentation and accounting for the ctionality of the text. As seen above in the account of how texts reach the reader, modes of reception and transmission do not fall easily into the two types for a given romantic or realistic work. Structural similarities across the types, in the framing of the novels and in the patterning of chapters, and to a degree in the use of song and poetry, call into question an easy designation of a work as pertaining to one or the other, and as adhering to the given codes of that stream. It may be that we are brought to conclude that both types draw on a common pool of narrative resources to create very different narrative ends, but the question of how individual authors make use of the various textual traditions they draw on, and to what purpose, is then primary. If, as suggested, many of the narratives deliberately 63

Wang, “Edifying Depravity,” 240. Wang writes further of Han Bangqing’s “rewriting of the laws of verisimilitude that pregure the characterization, plotting, rhetoric and general moral/cultural assumptions of a ctional genre known as the courtesan novel.” 64 Hanan, “Fengyue Meng,” 346.

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set out to be self-conscious explorations of the problematic triangular relationship between ction, life and the reader, then their artistry in accomplishing this is of prime interest. A fascination with the nature of the text and its transmission transcends the two identied types, and encourages the reader to examine works as individual entities, in all of their textual manifestations. 4.2

The Text in the World

The rst section of this chapter has shown how authors used divers means of textual play to structure their novels and interact with a range of generic materials. In doing so, they question the function of authorial creativity and the construct of ction. At a time when the design and textual format of novels lay increasingly within the purview of novelists, their concerns with text reect wider probing on the function and form of ctional writings. Although we have reasonable knowledge of libraries, networks and book distribution in the Qing, and of the mechanics of printing, and some sense of the economic factors of production, less is known of where, when and how novels were read. A whole series of other questions surrounding texts, which were debated in the 1980s and 90s in the West, remain largely unanswered in their parallel implications for Chinese works. These relate to the form of the text and the meaning of that form, and to the implications of transposing texts between forms for editors, authors and readers. What effect, for example, did the transformation to a print-dominated culture have on notions of authorship? If chirographical (hand-written) transmission has been seen by scholars of English texts as a halfway house between the oral and the printed text, in which the values of orality and presence were still felt, did this hold for the manuscript in China—or the cursive preface? Where along the continuum of author intervention should the block printed text be placed: with typeset print, as xed, denitive, promoting an understanding of an authoritative work and a xed nature of knowledge—or closer to the manuscript, as alterable, re-issuable and tending to multiple versions? In terms of reprints and editions, what happened to Chinese texts which had been transmitted in a uid scribal form when they were turned into print, after decades of such circulation: did the last pre-print version constitute the denitive text in the eyes of later editors, as assumed in the West?

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All of the red-light novels studied here prior to the journal-printed texts of the 1890s circulated in manuscript form for the rst few years, or decades, of their existence. Financial outlay, fears of censorship, and regard to the status of ction compelled reticence in approaching printing presses. It is an obvious point, but censorship in a system with no pre-print licensing can only operate on texts made visible to the authorities,65 and circulation in scribal form among trusted friends was the preferred option for many, a means of distributing certain texts without their reaching the authorities’ attention. Just as in seventeenth-century England, where there was “the very real danger that a text in uncontrolled manuscript circulation would sooner or later be piratically propelled into print,”66 the threat of relatives or commercial entrepreneurs putting into print a corrupted manuscript remained ever present. Various cases are recorded of Qing authors forced into press by this fear, or obliged to print an edition because of the high number of errors in someone else’s edited version. In China as the West, social groupings developed around text-swapping. Individuals within a region, a graduating year group, or clan, would pass on and borrow texts from each other, as well as purchasing from bookshops or borrowing from the huge holdings of known scholars. One of the universal functions of a hand-written text was that of bonding groups of readers together, the exchange of texts afrming and enriching shared values. The presentation of a text for comment or approval signied estimation of the recipient, an act of genteel inclusion. Texts were presented up and down social rankings, given as a bid for reward or expression of gratitude, and dutifully copied out at a patron’s request. Huayue hen was written at the behest of the author’s patron, and its individual chapters were passed onto him for perusal when completed. Scribal texts are not acquired randomly. They are always accessed through friendships, networks, or pre-extant communities. A great

65

Compare, for example, the circulation pattern and expectations of readers in the case of the Nobel prize-winning South African J.M. Coetzee, ve of whose novels during the censorship era of the 1970s and 80s managed to get through the system into print because his publishers, Ravan, refused to collude with the state and submit the texts in advance, and because of the inaction on the part of local readers who could have lobbied the Publications Control Board. See Peter D. McDonald, “Not Undesirable”: J.M. Coetzee and the Burdens of Censorship,” in Maureen Bell et al., eds., Re-constructing the Book (London: Ashgate, 2000), 170–183. 66 Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts, 72.

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degree of trust is required to loan a single-copy text to a friend either to read or to copy, or have copied for personal usage.67 Keeping track of one’s library was not always easy, since anything of novel length might require months of possession to transcribe. Stories of Ming and Qing lenders testing borrowers on works abound, and of readers and scholars so poor that they copied works out by the light of the moon reected in snow.68 Being well-read implied membership of this community of lenders and borrowers, a network of readers always provoked into the complementary act of writing, or commentating. This ties in closely with the level of intertextual references and afnities in red-light works shown above. Inherent in scribal publication was the idea that power gained from a text might depend on others being denied access, whether because readers belonged to a gentlemanly club, or because a work was dubious in erotic, heterodox or political content. Manuscript texts were inscribed by many hands, and reinscribed by successive owners: a perfect medium, one might argue, for a work on the courtesan. That a text could circulate for forty or fty years and still be considered worth the effort of copying and publishing incrementally is quite remarkable testimony to its readability. Despite the best efforts of Qianlong and of the Taiping armies, copies of banned texts remained in circulation throughout the Qing—or in illicit storage to be re-circulated once politics permitted. Unlike in the twentieth century, when publication meant printing (and excluding the twenty-rst from this, since internet publishing again complicates), it is not clear that in the nineteenth century a text had to be printed to be made public, and some banned texts might be considered public.69 A text of interest, and

67 Love categorises MS copying as authorial holograph (when copies are made by the author or under his/her direction), copies made by specialist scribes, and copies made by individuals wishing to possess a text, and terms these acts: “author publication,” “entrepreneurial publication,” and “user publication.” See The Culture and Commerce of Texts, 46–47. In Qing China, user publication seems to have been by far the most frequent method of obtaining a personal copy of a text, with no documented industry of scribes and scriveners producing semi-commercial MS texts. 68 For examples of readers from the dynastic histories so poor they could not afford candles etc., and on borrowers being tested on the return of a volume see Drège, Les Bibliothèques en Chine, 149–151; 154. Drège cites also Yan Zhihui’s notes on the etiquette of taking care of borrowed books, see p. 161. 69 Centuries of calligraphic publication in existence alongside printed texts meant that manuscript texts in China were an accepted part of public discourse, where ‘public’ refers to groupings of the elite or inuential. If publication is taken as “a movement from private realm of creativity to public realm of consumption” and the moment this change of domain happens is “that at which the initiating agent knowingly relinquishes

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one whose existence had become known through word of mouth, would never lack copyists. The dissemination of novels such as Pinhua baojian (1849) falls into this category of texts loaned, copied and passed on. A critical mass of copies was evidently needed before a work would be widely known among disparate groups of acquaintances, but the degree of importance attached to library size, and the habit of reproducing texts in compendia as well as individually, commended copying and militated against the force of lost texts. A decision to print was almost exclusively for the pre-1890s texts not that of the author, but in most cases, of descendants, either for nancial gain or to publicise more widely the work and merit of kin. Printing in China no more xed texts than had erratic MS circulation: this expectation of uidity is part of the play on retreating levels of authorial self seen in the framing devices and elusive narrator of the earlier red-light works. The decision to print Huayue hen, which circulated in manuscript form for several decades, was apparently eventually taken on nancial grounds. After the death of the author Wei Xiuren, his friend Xie Zhangting 謝章鋌 had approached the author’s brother Wei Xiufu 魏秀孚 and suggested the novel might have a certain market value in Beijing, and that with the proceeds they could have other of Wei Xiuren’s works printed. The brother prevaricated, and another clansman in straitened circumstances, possibly the author’s son Wei Shao’an 魏少安, had the work printed (without using the proceeds to publicise further novels).70 Robert Hegel has noted that while publication for early novels did not bring a security of text as publishers emended at will, literati novels of the late Ming and Qing were less likely to be modied in subsequent editions, but rather sequelled or imitated.71 control over the future social use of that text” then the act of reproduction becomes the key to publishing. See Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts, 39. Love excludes MS texts still at the “seeking comment” stage from this notion of public, which might be more problematic in China, since MS and print texts constantly elicited further comment. As Love plausibly holds, a manuscript text must usually be regarded as republished as often as it is copied, with each new act of copying producing an edition of one. 70 See Gu Qiyin’s preface to the Zhonghua Shuju edition of Huayue hen, p. 8. Gu quotes from the memoirs of Xie Zhangting 謝章鋌 Ke yu xu lu 課餘續錄, juan 1. 71 Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction. As Hegel notes (p. 154), important texts like Honglou meng were not printed but circulated as manuscripts among “a closed circle of understanding readers,” printing being a making public. As we have seen above, this stance can be modied to include such MS circulation as publication, in the sense of bringing to an audience and relinquishing control over the text and its subsequent use. In the case of Honglou meng, for example, by the time of printing the text existed in numerous, and substantially modied, forms.

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Fictional texts, Hegel concludes, became virtually as sacrosanct as works in higher literary forms if associated with a literatus author. Close comparison of the editorial history of even the lesser-modied literati works reveals, however, fairly free rendering of the linguistic codes of such texts over the last century, and even less compunction in adapting paratextual features. The red-light novels discussed here, themselves often indebted to Honglou meng, have not risen to spawn sequels and their status as texts is rather ambiguous. The authors were not prominent literati, and the content matter degrades the works for most critics, but the works are mostly from the latter half of the nineteenth century, when there was a greater uniformity in regard for all types of ction, and the essential story-texts of the novels have been little altered in successive printings. In this way, the novels may have retained a more stable form than vernacular works in the nineteenth-century West, where practices far removed from the philological work on classical texts were carried out on vernacular literature.72 The publishing pattern of Huayue hen suggests that the author regarded his work as aspiring to a reading by a discerning intellectual audience, and was keen to avoid print, but its subsequent publication and distribution have placed it rmly in the category of popular works. Textual plurality was a given in Qing China. Authors lived in an era of multiple editions and versions, and readers were used to, and trained in, assessing texts and editorial decisions. Purchasers of printed editions were savvy about what was available: editions with colophons (a summary of contents) from the hand of the renowned bibliophile Huang Peilie (1763–1825), who commentated on and annotated over 700 works in his lifetime, commanded a particularly high price.73 In reprinting a block printed, manuscript-style text as a typeset work, in what usually constituted the second stage of editing and printing for red-light works from the mid-nineteenth century, printing must have seemed like a wresting of the narrative text from the form of the work. From the early philosophers onwards, the text was perceived as separate 72 D.C. Greetham, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (New York: Garland, 1994), 319–20 documents examples of wilful experimentation on vernacular texts which practically raised critics to the position of co-authors, and notes that it was inevitable that undocumented conjecture should be the prevailing practice in the editing of vernacular texts until the afrmation of vernacular textual criticism as an essentially historical activity. 73 See Ji Shaofu, Zhongguo chuban jianshi, 205.

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from its entextualised message. The paradox of the literary text, alluded to by Zhuangzi and fortied by Zhu Xi is that the text in its ideal form is internalised, its moral lesson apprehended by the individual who will embody its learning. The material casing through which a text is transmitted is both of little import and to be revered as scripture.74 It is this disjuncture between form and meaning, dog-eaten manuscript copy with scribbled commentary and pristine, illustrated book that seems to have been present in the minds of late Qing novelists in their ludic play with textual transmission, and more subtly, with frame-breaks and intrusions into the textual reality. (The material existence of a text was never as obvious as in European societies, where the oral roots of texts were lost before academies began.) When printing was rst available and thereafter for several centuries in China, it was a means to dissemination: the physical script did not constitute the text in the way that a modern reader might assume, rather, the text was transcribed in a particular form but not constrained by it, the ideal text being that imprinted into the mind of the reader. The changing nature of printed texts brought this disparity into sharp focus and informed the narratives of late Qing writers. 4.2.1

New Printing Technologies and Novel Serialisation

If the May Fourth era has been too readily supposed to be ‘of the West’ in its appropriation of narrative techniques and ideologies, the inuence of the West on nineteenth-century literature in printing mechanisms and print format has until very recently been consistently underplayed, in part a result of contemporary disdain for the mechanics of technology. Although larger numbers of authors were taking an interest in print processes and their own text design, just as they had in England a few decades earlier, a strong undercurrent of scholarly distance from mercantile industry remained, as it did among educated westerners in China. (A trawl through 1890s and 1900s journals such as T’oung Pao, the French Bulletin Oriental or the Royal Asiatic Journal reveals scores of articles on faddish archaeology and topography, and next to nothing on contemporary Chinese literature or print.) The inuence of the 74 On text and entextualised, see also Judith Zeitlin’s study of temple wall poetry, where she notes that writing as literature was intended to survive independently of its original material form, by being memorised or passed down orally: “Disappearing Verses: Writing on Walls and Anxieties of Loss,” in Zeitlin and Liu, eds., Writing and Materiality, 78–9. Copying of texts ensured their immortality.

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West can be discerned in the mechanics of the presses, journal design, in the appearance of translations of western novels, and in derivative etchings and photos. Salient comparisons can be made between Qing and contemporary Victorian novels in aspects of narrative style, but more numerous resonances are to be found in the patterns of magazine and serial publication of ction. While it has been long acknowledged that the rst large-capacity presses with moveable type in China were western ones used by missionaries, and there is an extensive literature on the technical capacity of the machines and the earliest type fonts, less has been made of the connection between the burgeoning newspaper industry and other types of magazines and journals competing for readers.75 Changes in print technologies impacted on literature directly and indirectly. At the production end of the process, larger, faster presses increased the availability and the number of texts at the end of the Qing, as wider distribution networks increased supply. Author-publisher relations changed in nature as more works were published in the lifetime and under the direction of the author, who was in touch with printing houses or journal editors, or even managing the process personally. Art and illustrations reproduced by lithography became integral to some forms of ction. The status of reading and reading habits evolved as purchasers were forced to wait for the tides of the market to bring the next instalment of a novel: reading itself becoming a commercialised activity. This commercialisation can be seen as a prerequisite to reformers’ calls at the turn of the century for a literature to guide China forward, creating ction as a commodity for readers’ moral guidance as well as pleasure. Production and format changes also had more direct effects on narration. Since all formatting alterations affect the text, the various changes in print processes for both books and a growing journal literature inevitably inuenced reading and writing patterns. The effects on narration of serialised format alone, for example, include spacing and length of chapters, suspense, plot timing and overall narrative length.

75 For a study that does explore these connections in a later period, see Michel Hockx, Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911–37 (Leiden: Brill, 2003) esp. Chapter Four. This trafc was not all one way: Des Forges notes that the Shanghai novels themselves provided a model for reading newspapers, and the scandal columns were read as if an instalment novel. See Des Forges, “Building Shanghai,” 799–800.

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Changes in the printing industry and print media have been held decisive in changing narrative structures at the very end of the Qing, and in forming a particular Shanghai courtesan ction at the turn of the century. One recent analysis centres on the gradual change in ction format with the rise of the periodical press, and the effects on narrative of new-style publishing in short bursts of story. A second points to the pervasive image of the courtesan in the visual and material culture of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Shanghai, in newspaper feature reports, and prints of beauties everywhere from postcards to billboards.76 How the new visibility of the courtesan in public and print affected her representation in ction has yet to be fully explored, but both this and the periodic press undoubtedly did much for the popularisation of the courtesan as a thematic subject for ction. Towards the end of the Qing, it begins to be difcult to separate out newspapers from journals from literature. Literature itself was incrementally being redened by its new context. The earliest commercial newspapers began printing in the treaty ports in the 1860s and 70s, with a dozen or so regular dailies by the early 1890s and an estimated 80 by 1901.77 Added to these were a growing number of miscellaneous weeklies and monthlies, and literary journals. Circulation of the largest newspaper, the foreign-owned Shanghai Shen bao, reached around 15,000 in the 1890s: not a huge number, but with a much greater estimated readership. Many of the miscellanies carried topical items and political essays, entertaining selections, articles which brought the foreign and the novel nearer to home, as well as a selection of poetry, short stories and longer works of ction serialised over several editions. Shen bao itself carried numerous anecdotal stories which had more in common with the early Qing Liaozhai zhiyi collection of supernatural tales than modern broadsheet journalism.78 The same presses that produced journals published much of the new ction of the era, advertising new 76 For the rst, see Des Forges, “Building Shanghai;” on the second see Yeh, “Creating the Urban Beauty;” Yeh, Shanghai Love. 77 See Leo Ou-fan Lee and Andrew J. Nathan, “The Beginnings of Mass Culture: Journalism and Fiction in the Late Ch’ing and Beyond” in Johnson, Nathan and Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 362–64; cf. Roswell Britton, The Chinese Periodical Press, 1800–1912 (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1933). 78 For a fascinating short study of the strange in late Qing periodical literature, see Rania Huntington, “The Weird in the Newspaper,” in Liu and Zeitlin, eds., Writing and Materiality. Huntington counts on average one strange story every 5–6 days in the Shen bao between 1872 and 1884, with numbers reducing over the 1890s.

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press publications within their own magazines. The links between the press and ction were being made explicit well before reformers of the early twentieth century used literary and political journals to call for a new type of literature to guide China’s people.79 In China, as in the United Kingdom, the rise of the periodical press coincided with increased book sales nationally and a downwards educational drive. Between 1837 and 1870 an estimated 8–9000 works were published in England,80 while a handful of works published annually in nineteenth-century China grew exponentially in the 1900s to several hundred per year. In the same way as an economic slump in England in the 1830s which took out much of the established bookshop network paved the way for new marketing networks to develop, the Taiping destruction of the book trade in lower Jiangnan throughout the 1850s and 60s stalled sales but may be linked to the rise of the press from the 1870s onwards. Growth in the periodical press followed on from scaled-up, commercial, newspaper production and piggybacked newspaper distribution networks.81 Early trials of part-issue by the Shen bao newspaper in the 1870s were not immediately followed up, and growth in the 1890s has been taken as the beginning of this literary fashion. In Shanghai as in London, ction was serialised in current affairs miscellanies as well as dedicated literary magazines, and saw a bifurcation between the magazines providing popular, often sentimental or romantic stories, and those concerned more with knowledge than pleasure. Victorian commitment to promotion of the intellect and the mind saw its counterpart in the array of Chinese magazines at the turn of the century which tirelessly promoted European art in frontispiece illustrations (with Degas a rm favourite) and ran articles on everything

79 In 1895, for example, scientist and entrepreneur John Fryer announced in the press a public contest for new novels tackling the themes of opium, the exam essay and foot-binding. Like Victorian reformers, Fryer understood the power of story-telling over the “popular mind,” and asked “the novel to perform a function it had scarcely been asked to perform in China—to treat and solve intractable problems of national concern.” Anonymous (Patrick Hanan), “The New Novel before the New Novel: John Fryer’s Fiction Contest,” in Liu and Zeitlin, eds., Writing Materiality, 328. 80 John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995), 151. Statistics from the trade journal Publishers’ Circle suggest that during that period, the percentage of ction among that number rose from 12 to 25%. The Education Act of 1870 provided a growing juvenile market. 81 While there had been some issues of part books earlier, the appearance of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers from Chapman & Hall in 1836 in number format surprised the English printing scene, and soon spawned numerous copies.

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from poetic metre to worm infections.82 Was serialisation a marketing ploy in China? A technological feat that attracted the innovative, creating new narrative forms to suit production modes? Or was it, as for Dickens, in part a philanthropic gesture towards educating a wider readership? In terms of the history of literary serialisations, a glance at the much better-documented journal industry in nineteenth-century England allows parallels to be drawn to the context for Haishang hua liezhuan’s serialised publication from 1892 onwards in author Han Bangqing’s edited journal Haishang qishu 海上奇書, or the publication of Jiu wei gui in parts by the Dianshizhai 點石齋 press between 1906 and 1910. In England, there were two types of early serial publication of ction: the publication of a single novel in parts spread over several months, often called works in numbers, and the serialisation of a novel in successive issues of a literary magazine or a journal carrying a range of writing types. The earliest number works came out in the eighteenth century, and ourished from the 1830s to 1850s, while periodical magazines carrying ction had their heyday in the second half of the nineteenth century, with explosive growth in the late 1850s and early 60s. The rationale given for both types has usually been the economic one: that part publication spread the risk for a publisher, who could vary his print numbers according to demand, and enabled a broad readership, for whom a single volume represented considerable outlay, to spread payments.83 That demand for this type of publication of ction was publisher-led has been variously established; what is also certain is that a new style of author-publisher relations entered play, with authors both taking an active part in negotiating format and illustration, and working to tighter constraints on chapter length and writing deadlines. As in England, it was primarily contemporary ction that was rst serialised in China, the works themselves garnering a new reading public. In China as in England too, the high hopes of early serial publishers produced numerous failures, the market not able to sustain even the relatively small number of part issues from publishers trying to make a quick prot. Many journals in both countries never made it beyond one or two instalments, and the numbers of insolvent publishers

See Funü zazhi 婦女雜志 (The Ladies’ Journal) 1919 Vol. 3. See e.g. Graham Law, Serialising Fiction in the Victorian Press (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2000), 3–4 on economic motivation. 82

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rose. Even Thackeray’s Vanity Fair nearly sank into obscurity after its third instalment in 1847, as a trade depression picked off publishers. Publishers in each continent may have started out with a xed run in mind, but either foreclosed, or more rarely, persuaded an author to spin out a story for several more months. Thackeray’s Pendennis fell into this favoured category, as did Haishang fanhua meng, extended from thirty to sixty chapters.84 When a journal did take off in England, bidding wars for pre-eminent writers allowed the author to dictate terms, and the “delicately poised balance of forces between author, editor, publisher and reading public” might be disturbed until contracts were signed and a new run underway.85 Collaborations did not necessarily last, and the editors of seemingly stable journals switched presses often in both countries,86 journals changing names and appearances regularly. An outcome of such printing uidity was the renewed impetus to continuation publishing: the author of Jiu wei gui, for example, produced a sequel to his work after the 1911 revolution, setting the twelve new sections in the Republican era. The sequel has been rarely reprinted, being universally regarded as of poorer quality.87 The corollary was failed works: Li Boyuan’s Haitian hong xue ji, like Liang Qichao’s Xin Zhongguo weilai ji 新中國未來紀 (A diary of the future of New China), was never nished, and even Niehai hua appeared sporadically rather than in consecutive issues of the journal Xiaoshuo lin 小說林, curiously beginning from the twenty-second chapter in its inaugural issue. While some novels such as Liang Qichao’s Xin Zhongguo weilai ji died a sudden death as serial sales fell, others which were curtailed in journal format later made successful books when completed. Some titles were shortened, but others were extended. Jiu wei gui ended up a massive 192 chapters, appearing in parts over a four-year span, an unwillingness to bring the book to a ‘normal’ end attributed by at least one commentator to “commercial considerations.”88

84 Des Forges, “Building Shanghai,” 803. In the case of red-light ction, successful blackmail has been given as a reason for publications to cease after a few chapters—see Liu Ts’un-yan, Chinese Middlebrow Fiction, 25, for reference to Lu Xun’s 1931 talk “A Glance at Shanghai Literature” with comments on instalment ction. 85 Sutherland, Victorian Fiction, 61. For details of the bidding wars for Charles Reade’s works see p. 56. 86 The North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society journal, for example, switched printing facility at least twice over its early run. 87 On the sequel, see Chen Pingyuan, Chen Pingyuan xiaoshuo shi lunji, 1418. 88 See e.g. Wang, Fin-de-siècle Splendor, 83.

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New problems arose with the success of the serial format. By the 1860s in England a serial magazine like Dickens’ All Year Round was enjoying steady sales of 100,000. Writers struggled to keep up with the demand for twenty thousand words a month of text, and engravers in particular caused great problems for publishers when, over-stretched, they failed to deliver commissions and delayed an issue.89 The market-driven nature of the periodical press is visible everywhere in its deadlines, in its payment-per-sheet policy and in its specialised division of labour.90 Authors in the main sought to remain anonymous: novel writing in either country was not yet widely accepted as a genteel pursuit, and monthly serialisation in particular attracted “vulgar associations.”91 Nonetheless, a class of professional writers grew around magazine serialisations.92 Prolixity, it would seem, was common to authors of both continents. 4.2.2

Serial and Narrative

Just as the differences between manuscript and printed text provoke different patterns of transmission and reading, developing a habit for consuming ction as each chapter came to press required adjustment for educated Qing subjects. Des Forges writes of the “addiction” to instalment ction that readers of the era experienced.93 For writers, while the episodic narrative format of traditional novels has been supposed readily translatable to publication by chapter or in parts, there were still lessons to learn. The element of suspense, where traditional chapters in oral narration mode ended with a rhetorical ourish encouraging the listener/reader to consider what might happen next, was one aspect of traditional narrative thought most amenable to transfer, but here too the evidence suggests a more complex process. Writers such as Han

89 See J.R. Harvey, Victorian Novelists and their Illustrators (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970), 189–90. 90 Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 12–13, argues that the English literary profession had become driven by the market by the 1820s/30s. 91 Sutherland, Victorian Fiction, 92. 92 For the Chinese case, see gures from Lee and Nathan. Sutherland estimates that of around 1200 novelists at work at the end of the nineteenth century in Britain, about 200 were supported by their work alone (Victorian Fiction, 151–2). He also notes the long writing careers of the Victorians—almost half of all titles published in the era were produced by writers with a lifetime output of over 40 works. 93 Des Forges, “Building Shanghai,” 801.

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Bangqing or Wu Jianren played to their new format, garnering praise for curtailing each instalment on a note of suspense, just as episode writers of soap operas are trained to now, but as commentators on Han Bangqing’s novel have noted, the author moved away from the traditional episodic format in his new instalment ction.94 Haishang hua liezhuan refutes traditional views of instalment publication as careless and hasty, since it is neither dashed off for publication nor written without consideration for the whole. As Des Forges points out, in this novel Han was “obsessive” in his attention to people and place names to ensure consistency, producing a more coherent narrative than many Ming and Qing predecessors. Haishang hua liezhuan shows “none of the discontinuities and moments of repetition we would expect”95 of instalment ction, and lacks precisely those stereotyped features of episodic narrative believed amenable to part publication. In the reading notes (lieyan 列言) to his novel, rst published in ones and twos in each journal edition and later gathered together and published as an attachment to various book editions, Han Bangqing claims that timed publication was precisely a strength of the new novels, forcing the reader to proceed more slowly and appreciate plot lines more carefully, a sentiment which resurrects Neo-Confucian beliefs on the purpose of reading. The careful plotting of time in Haishang hua and Jiu wei gui reects both a contemporary concern with all things temporal that a newly mobile and mechanised society brought, and the need for clear time frames that arises with a complex interweaving of characters and stories.96 Instalment narrative did not necessarily create narrative complexity, but the more intertwined plots that authors were simultaneously developing did demand ingenuity from author and reader. In Haishang hua liezhuan Han deliberately cut story themes through chapters, moving from a simple chapter ending-based suspense to a complex weaving of story lines, taking up themes mid-chapter.97 Although Han may have carefully detailed his plot lines, this could only partially compensate

94

See Des Forges, “Building Shanghai,” 781. Des Forges, “Building Shanghai,” 788. 96 On time and new time consciousness, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The owering of a new urban culture in China 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) 43–45, 79–80. 97 See Liu Ts’un-yan, Chinese Middlebrow Fiction, 14–15; Cheng, “Flowers of Shanghai;” Des Forges, “Street Talk and Alley Stories” for discussion of Han’s narrative techniques. 95

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for the vagaries of serial publication from which his magazine was no more immune than the average. While Haishang qishu was an appealing package, with the two chapters of the novel appearing in each issue alongside biji jottings and short stories and illustrations from Dianshizhai artists, the magazine had a low circulation and was “never published on time,”98 a state of affairs that cannot have aided readers’ appreciation of the very modern concern with time-keeping evident in the narrative. As with the absence of poetry in Jiu wei gui, structural changes in the later red-light works beyond the 1890s did not necessarily imply a decreasing emphasis on the text, or interest in the status of text as ction. Two aspects of structure that Han Bangqing introduced in his Haishang hua liezhuan are particularly worthy of note in this respect. The rst is the use of language; the second is modes of shift between narrative threads or points of view. In his explanatory notes, Han describes how he invented certain characters to represent Wu dialect words. Jiu wei gui was among those later works to adopt this trend, though it used dialect only for certain characters. Lexicon now differentiated socially as verse composition or quotation might once have done.99 Use of dialect was one aspect of language experimentation that culminated in the wholesale switch from a written-only language of ction to a speech-based pattern. Though this change has usually been associated with the May Fourth writers inspired by Hu Shi, others have more recently argued that it was the journals at the end of the late Qing that brought about the disintegration of the difference between vernacular and classical literature. The same magazines, such as Han Bangqing’s Haishang qishu with its chapters of Haishang hua liezhuan alongside short stories in wenyan wen, carried ction in both forms of language, and the same magazines carried translations of foreign novels into both baihua and wenyan, with the same authors writing both.100 The genre stipulations that had ensured each form had its own characteristics and readers no longer held, and after 1906 short stories as well as longer ction appeared in vernacular. Even Liang Qichao used a ‘wenyan lite’ for his translation Shiwu xiao haojie 十五小豪杰 (Fifteen martial braves), carried in Xinmin congbao 新民叢報 in 1902, because he found it difcult to express the meaning of a translation fully in concise classical forms. 98

Liu Ts’un-yan, Chinese Middlebrow Fiction, 13. A point made by Chen Pingyuan: see his discussion of dialect novels at the end of the Qing in Chen Pingyuan xiaoshuo shi ji, 1425–7. 100 Chen Pingyuan, Chen Pingyuan xiaoshuo shi ji, 1414. 99

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Han Bangqing self-consciously set out to create a new style of narrative, and made certain through his reading explanations that his audience was aware of his techniques. While Han still held to the dream sequence opening favoured by earlier red-light works, with the narrator-author appearing in the text and sauntering out of view, beyond this, he sloughed off textual inserts and chose instead to create a ctive text through playing with chronologies of narrative, transposing sections of text and inserting actions and sequences in places new to episodic ction. Stephen Cheng’s translation of the well-known explanatory sentence on Han’s technique of “implicit narration” makes clear the link between ction and text that he sought to replicate: Before one incident is over, another has begun; sometimes ten or more incidents are launched in succession. The narrative proceeds casually, frequently changing tack. No event is told in its entirety all at once, and yet no thread is left out. Upon reading, one is aware of a “text behind the text”, though it is not narrated explicitly one can sense its presence.101

Sense units, or narrative threads of stories, are not consonant with chapter units as they had been in episodic ction, but may begin and end part-way through a chapter, breaking up other story episodes. This soap opera, or screenwriting format pregures writing shifts of the twentieth century. While a reduction in different styles of textual notation, such as drama scripts or writs, in the text of Haishang hua liezhuan has been noted, the novel is not entirely free from textual accretions. As Eileen Chang remarks in the introduction to her translation, Hu Shi noted that “a poem and an erudite tale have been worked into the book just to show off the author’s prowess in other realms of belles-lettres.”102 As noted earlier, Chang held that the scholarly drinking games and double-entendres in the novel were untranslatable, and that the poems should be excised. The effects of editing are pernicious because the reader is often left unaware of what s/he does not know: as Des Forges notes, Chang’s own widely-available translation into modern standard Chinese of Haishang hua liezhuan condenses nine chapters into ve, removing precisely those sections of static text where characters indulge in the drinking games, poetry composition and garden pursuits found in earlier red-light works, and less amenable to

101

Haishang hua liezhuan, Lieyan 1. Translated in Cheng, “Sing-Song Girls,” 112. Eileen Chang, ‘translation notes’ in Liu Ts’un-yan, ed., Chinese Middlebrow Fiction, 96; repr. in Han, The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, xxii. 102

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translation.103 The riddles and poetry composition that occupy characters in the garden scene in Chapter 53, for example, may not have quite the depth of allusion of parallel scenes from a work such as Huayue hen, or match that novel in their frequency, but they are certainly of one substance, and integral to the author’s concept of his work. Instalment ction has been characterised by Des Forges via three tropes: simultaneity, interruption and excess, which together “articulate a new form of narrative presentation that spreads to other print genres.” The element of simultaneity, where readers consume different but contiguous narratives at one sitting in the new multi-text magazine format, clearly affected how chapters of novels are processed in the mind. Mixed-text reading was not a new phenomenon for late Qing Chinese, however, since the split page had been common for centuries in works like encyclopaedias. The text and context issue is not as straightforward in the Chinese case as in the western one, given this recourse to already familiar printing styles where multiple texts ran alongside one another on the same page.104 If printed editions, and particularly re-printed editions, took little heed of authorial intention in the set of prefaces and colophons to the rst edition, serial publication in a magazine threatened a different sort of loss of authorial control. Paradoxically, ction serialisation in the early journals often signied a gain in authorial inuence, since it was the authors who were involved as commissioning editors, blackening their hands in ink and the politics of commerce. The differences between Chinese novels and serialised ction format can be overstated, and undermine claims that serial ction comprises a new genre of narrative.105 The physical nature of a Chinese volume, composed of multiple fascicles (ce) meant that readers had for centuries been used to reading ‘parts.’ The process of composition of novels like Pinhua baojian or Huayue hen described above suggests friends and patrons often received chapters as they were written, in a drip-feed

103 Cf. Des Forges, “Street Talk and Alley Stories,” Chapter Three. Chapters 38–57 of Haishang hua liezhuan are abridged or re-ordered in Chang’s putonghua version. 104 See Shang Wei, “Jin Ping Mei,” and discussion above. 105 Cf. Des Forges, “Building Shanghai,” 783. This would suggest that the print mode constituted a text, a genre, which is problematic not least in its implications for previous more long-lived modes of publication, or for classication among serialised novels. Des Forges notes, though, that by the early 1900s narratives of all genres from court case ction to qianze stories appeared in instalments.

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process akin to serial publication.106 Ming and Qing novels have been revised endlessly and attacked or defended by later critics because of their inconsistencies: these lapses were not caused by serial publication, the author forgetting what had gone before, but by an equally strungout process of composition, and even by continuation by a second hand. Non-instalment ction continued apace in the late Qing, and even a serialised work such as Haishang hua liezhuan was rst published complete in monograph form, in 1894. Claims for instalment ction as the “occasion for a fundamental rethink of novel writing”107 seem overblown, as short stories soon eclipsed serial novels in early twentieth-century China. In terms of form, format and narrative, study of early Chinese serialised novels produces a surprising result: these are in many ways much closer to Chinese book format than to later magazine serials, echoing the two-stage part and serial publication of English ction during the mid-nineteenth century. The fortnightly Haishang Qishu, like the early Dianshizhai publications, looked pretty much like a thread-bound Qing book, and the block printing style of early magazines gave way to innovations in font, decorated borders, advertisements, coloured pages and lithograph illustrations only late in the last decade of the Qing and the rst of the Republican era.108 Unlike with Dickens’ number publications, where early sales depended on the quality and appeal of the artwork and reprints might attract more modish illustrations, and where Dickens had a particularly close and directive working relationship with his illustrators, sometimes even tting text around the etchings,

106

Des Forges argues that the chapter-by-chapter narrative style of vernacular ction is given a deeper grounding in Huayue hen in the constant references to the author’s own situation as tutor and storyteller, and can be seen as a precursor of Haishang hua in its presentation, “Building Shanghai,” 799. 107 Des Forges, “Building Shanghai,” 805. 108 Not all periodicals at the turn of the century made use of new printing possibilities that technology furnished. Liang Qichao’s Shiwu Bao 時務報 (The Times) which began publication in 1897 was formatted very similarly to a book, with the heavy block borders of earlier Qing texts, and line divisions between each of the 15 columns per page. With no illustrations, no comment and no punctuation, little other than the article length and tenor might suggest this was a new form of publication, one whose cover announced an edition price of 1.5 jiao, or 4.5 yuan for annual subscriptions. The miscellany Qingyi Bao 清議報 (The China Discussion) of 1899, which appeared three times a month, likewise followed earlier book formats, with a full block format of 13 columns of 45 characters (still with sh tail markers at the page fold) and no illustrations. Some decorative edging had begun to creep into the contents page, but punctuation remained sporadic.

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authors like Han Bangqing sought to attract readers through novel narrative techniques.109 The context of magazine reading, “a mode of emergence which radically affects the meaning of a particular essay, review, poem or novel”110 is clearly important, but the reading process for these early serialised works was not yet so changed. Even the uidity of magazine reading, choosing between articles, and reading in any order, was scarcely a new process to those accustomed to Chinese miscellanies with three-part parallel, entirely disparate, texts. 4.2.3

Text and Image

In the switch from whole to part book sales in England, one factor was prominent: the addition of pictures. For monthly parts, illustrations by well-known engravers were used to market the editions as they reached the shops. In China too, illustrations in red-light ction came with changes to print format.111 While rst editions of the earlier red-light novels (such as the printed Pinhua baojian in 1849, or the 1888 Huayue hen) do not carry illustrations, Han Bangqing had pictures commissioned for the rst full book format Haishang hua liezhuan, and early editions of Jiu wei gui inserted picture plates as well as cover illustrations.112 The image of the courtesan, meanwhile, was everywhere prominent at the turn of the twentieth century: in pictorials, entertainment newspapers, Shanghai city guides, and soon in advertisements. The link between images of the courtesan and her ctive counterparts invites closer scrutiny. What is surprising, is quite how far red-light characters seem from the media representations Catherine

109 On Dickens’ relationship with Hablot Browne (Phiz) and later illustrators, see Harvey, Victorian Novelists and their Illustrators, 3, 11, 160 et passim. Harvey argues the importance of the eye to Victorian novelists, with Dickens’s visual imagination particularly keen. A number of others novelists such as Thackeray or George du Maurier had early careers as engravers. Illustrations were regarded as functional and important, working with the text to describe character or provide humour in caricature. In her study of the illustrations of Shanghai courtesan novels, one aspect that Catherine Yeh does not detail is whether Chinese authors had any working connection with their illustrators or not. 110 Parker, Literary Magazines, 3. 111 For a much fuller discussion of the art and illustration of texts during the Qing, see Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 151–162; 214–216. 112 Although Hegel has shown that by the Qing illustrations were a negative indicator of book quality, this link does not seem to hold true for the very end of the dynasty. See Hegel, Reading Illustrated Fiction, 155–6; 286–8.

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Yeh documents in fascinating detail in Shanghai Love. According to Yeh’s analysis, at the turn of the century the image of the courtesan underwent a dramatic change from exclusive to popular, secluded to public, becoming a symbol of the urban, of Shanghai glamour and commercial might, just as these became progressive and acceptable in society. The pervasive image of the Shanghai courtesan “dominated the representations of leisure and entertainment” with widespread commercial use of her gure. Regaining the high ground of glamour lost since the Ming, this representation was now on the courtesan’s own terms, rather than as muse or amanuensis of infatuated lover. Courtesans themselves were posing for photographs, soliciting business, and pillorying in newsprint lovers who defaulted on payment.113 Those writing on the legal aspects of prostitution have also suggested that the trade was becoming increasingly proactive, shown, for example, in stipulations requiring all courtesan houses in Shanghai after 1889 to be identied by a lantern, with prohibitions on accosting passers-by.114 In the more open city environment, and particularly the foreign concessions, the courtesan had become more visible in both person and print, depicted in pictorials and city guides riding in carriages between engagements, or in teahouses or temples. Print culture promoted this new image, with sales of prints such as the 1884 Shenjiang shengjing tu 申將勝景圖 (Illustrated Grand Scenes of Shanghai) from the Dianshizhai studio lled with urbane courtesans, and newspapers such as the Youxi bao 游 戲報 (Entertainment Paper) reporting on the lives and loves of the more famous girls. In the new print media, images of the courtesan reected the pull of Janus between old and new. Poems and odes to beauty ran alongside stories of arrogance or ckleness in Shen bao. Images of stately 113 See Catherine Vance Yeh, “Creating the Urban Beauty: The Shanghai Courtesan in Late Qing Illustrations,” in Liu and Zeitlin, eds., Writing and Material Culture. Yeh writes that in the 1880s novels with courtesans as their main characters began to appear, with the negative depictions of courtesans in the late 90s and early 1900s “rooted in the complex response of literati novelists to their social position in the Shanghai foreign settlements and their troubled identity in this city” (p. 398). We have evidently seen courtesan novels long before the 1880s, and while the negative depiction of courtesans is certainly linked to the social identity of the literati, the Shanghai aspect must be seen as one manifestation of a much wider tradition of red-light ction, and one to which these authors consciously and repeatedly refer. This article is expanded in Yeh’s later monograph, Shanghai Love. 114 See Henriot Prostitution and Sexuality, 274–5; 284–6. Despite attempts at regulation particularly from the Chinese authorities, courtesans remained free to trade, but attempts were made to keep brothels and their inhabitants away from the major boulevards.

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grandeur sat next to illustrations of courtesans who had been caught in lewd acts, kneeling before foreign magistrates.115 The commerce which the courtesan embodied still attracted ambivalence. By the early twentieth century the image of courtesan had morphed into that of fashionable model, with little explicit link left between beauty and profession. An initial revival of status as elite beauty had been taken over by a backlash against the values of commercialism, only for the courtesan to be reinvented as urban beauty, a gure created in and for the context of the mass market for leisure.116 As the printed image of the courtesan jostled with her portrayal in red-light novels, the question remains whether red-light ction gained a greater readership from the bandwagon of popular interest in the courtesan gure, or whether the red-light authors were marginalised in the saturation of courtesan images and tales. Since the image of the courtesan in ction and in illustration did not develop in close tandem, the history of artistic depiction deriving from its own traditions and time frame, a further question arises of whether the new pictorial images inuenced her written portrayal, or whether the images were responding directly to social reality, refracted separately in the novels. Yeh correlates the changing image of the courtesan in new print media with that of the city, describing as “revolutionary” the images of the women in the public urban space in the rst illustrated editions of the novels in the 1890s.117 A dilemma for the artist lay in the status of subject matter: gardens and lone females portrayed traditional arts and elegance, while the city was tainted in the aesthetic realm by mercantile associations.

115 See Yeh, “Creating the Urban Beauty” for discussion of the image of the courtesan, now synonymous with meiren (beauty); pp. 416, 423. In the Haishang baiyan tu 海上百 艶圖 (100 Illustrated Beauties), courtesans returned to their pedestal of high culture. 116 See Yeh, “Creating the Urban Beauty,” 416, 429. As new standards of urban beauty were being realised through illustrated magazines, new artistic genres were dened in new, foreign, modes of printing. As Yeh details, images of courtesans set in Shanghai predominated, but alongside depictions of courtesans in carriages or kneeling before western magistrates, were idealised albums in a more timeless and more universal fashion. An 1887 collection of biographies and copper engravings of fty Shanghai courtesans produced by a group of literati falls into this category. These pictures, denuded of more obvious Shanghai markers, emphasise the continuity of literati ideals. Yeh sees features which “betray” Shanghai origins in the work, but it is perfectly possible that intellectuals did not regard courtesans just as a Shanghai phenomenon, and were less partisan in their understanding of the tradition. 117 Yeh, Shanghai Love, 290.

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Yeh suggests the more realistic, urban writing on the courtesan at the end of the Qing is linked to a changing self-assessment of the writers, whose standing and values were under threat. As we have seen in a close reading of the earlier narratives, few of the nineteenth-century authors of red-light works were of particularly high social standing, and their self-regard is parodied in the treatment of the male protagonists. The centrality of client, rather than courtesan, to red-light ction, may have some bearing on this discussion. As analysis of characters’ biographies, focalization and the narrator attest, the literary representations of courtesans shows them primarily in terms of relationship, and as refracted through a male gaze. Since there is as yet little evidence of close relationships between authors and illustrators, and given that the new style of illustration did not portray actual incidents in the texts with much greater delity than the earlier blandly evocative line drawings, it seems reasonable to suppose that the illustrations in ction bore more relation to illustrations in magazines and city guides than to the new literary representations, which as suggested, changed less than might be assumed over the last decades of the century. Haishang hua liezhuan was never a best-seller, for all (or perhaps because of ) its narrative innovations, but the rush of courtesan texts at the very end of the Qing suggests a commercial symbiosis between representations in picture and print. The literary record, however, is not one of increasing glamour in line with images in the new print media. Finery and beauty belong more to the earlier tranche of novels than to those of the nal decades of the Qing. While novels like Jiu wei gui or Haishang fanhua meng portray avaricious and wily women, there is little concomitant pictorial evidence of literati demise: clients are not mocked in etchings or woodcuts in the same way as their lovers. Yeh argues that the concession culture, with its premium on trade and money, challenged the literati value system, but that as journalists and editors, the late Qing elite could utilise their public voice against the self-made courtesans who invoked the protections of the concessions to craft their personae. Those literati who wanted to maintain control over the narrative of the courtesan had to face the new print market and shaping of the courtesan image. This line of argument is persuasive, and in Haishang hua liezhuan and Jiu wei gui we see a level of vilication of certain women and of their amoral actions rarely seen in earlier works. As previous chapters on characterisation and narration have shown though, the catty, vituperative side of women exacting their revenge surfaced in earlier works such as Fengyue meng,

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and is present in negative in the self-loathing and suicide attempts of women even in the ‘romantic’ works. That both women and men are more open in their condemnation of each other in the later works is evident, but whether this can be ascribed to changing mores or more to media images is less easy to discern. Red-light novelists in the new era seem unfazed that they are out of kilter with prevailing pictorial glamour, unless we see the ‘reality’ of their depictions as a direct challenge to the new image-making. While illustrations are an important and often overlooked aspect of the textual record, it is possible to overplay their signicance, especially in the longer history of the novels, since they tend to be edition-specic. Although Haishang hua liezhuan rst appeared with illustrations, these are still mostly genteel interiors rather than the radical new cityscapes of magazine imagery (although, as Yeh stresses, the depictions revealed conspicuous western consumption in furnishings). The traditional line drawings of elegant, individual gures of the 1900s Huayue hen are anomalous in the novel’s history; neither the rst edition nor most subsequent ones have carried illustrations, including those from the late twentieth century. Authors of the late nineteenth century, especially those close to print production such as Han Bangqing, experimented with the exciting new possibilities that lithographic etchings and magazine formats offered, but we cannot assume that contemporary readers viewed illustrations as integral to the story, or expected them to portray insights not gleaned from the narrative. The textual record is not one of increasing glamour in line with images of the courtesan in new print media, and the tension between the chic model beauty of certain new media images and her ctional representation is apparent. The new authors were depicting a refracted ction of their own experience, which was now broader than the literature-steeped visions of Yu Da or Wei Xiuren, and included both an ongoing reassessment of the role and position of client and courtesan, and new patterns of textual representation. It is true that by publishing in the new journals, literati like Han Bangqing created a more immediate public following for their emerging literature, and one which tted in with the culture and transience of the times. To characterise, though, the transition in the role of literati from patron, client, lover and husband to “a wage-earner making a living by writing on rising stars,” is to assume a fundamental shift in the reason for writing across the last decades of the century which is difcult to substantiate from novel texts—if not from the gossip columns, guidebooks and other styles of writings on courtesans. As their predecessors had done, client-novelists

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created ctions of selves and lovers: that these were now marketable tales speaks of the interaction of literature and market as much as authorial motivation. The cross-over between ction and life is a further aspect of journalistic publishing which several commentators have noted. While the extent may be greater in the very late Qing, in part due to the increase in numbers of red-light novels, roman-à-clef characterisation for clients as well as courtesans had been seen as early as Chen Sen’s mid-century Pinhua baojian. The inclusion of external reality in novels in the gure of known women, such as the appearance of courtesan Lin Daiyu in Jiu wei gui, may be seen not just as an effect of print journalism, but as an extension of the play on narratorial persona that several of the earlier novels employ, and as a marker of the constructed and ctive nature of the novels. 4.3

Subsequent Editions: Red-light Fiction Re-made

If the red-light novelists sought to highlight the importance of the physical text in the process of reading, and if authors in the last decades of the Qing had an opportunity to make their mark on the production of that text, they have inevitably had little to say about how subsequent editions of their novels have been presented to readers, and how these editions might alter the format of the text, and so the construction of ctionality proposed. Each of the six main works studied here were to be found in a ne printed edition in the second half of the nineteenth century or early years of the twentieth. Most were also reprinted throughout the nineteen tens, twenties and thirties, acquiring extra prefaces and explanatory notes, some advertising material, punctuation and a modern book format. Texts of the early twentieth century were still in vertical format, but printed on single sheet, aky paper in cheap, mass editions. Following a lengthy hiatus after the founding of the People’s Republic, Qinglou meng, Huayue hen et al. began to re-appear in bookshops. As a reader, selecting an edition of a courtesan novel from among the many currently available is no easy feat. A cursory study conrms at least seven companies with two or more of the six novels under study in press.118 The range of print quality, price, and presentation is great. 118

Shanghai Guji, Qilu Shushe, Zhonghua Shuju, Han Yuan, Huashan Wenyi, Renmin Zhongguo and Shanxi Guji.

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The re-making of the modern red-light novel has brought about a generation of texts whose distance from their predecessors is apparent in their form and its encoded assumptions. This code of meaning embodied in the physique of a book is deciphered by the reader, “more or less deeply, more or less self-consciously.”119 In most of the modern edition red-light novels, the reader is sold a popular tome. This is not the re-issue of a nineteenth-century novel for scholarly purposes but for reading pleasure. There are few, if any, references to earlier editions embedded within. Versions such as the Shanghai Guji or Qilu Shushe ones make no attempt to be scholarly critical editions, concealing changes to the copy-text and avoiding mention of variant readings.120 Only references to the Qing dynasty on the front cover and the style of language indicate the age of the novels. Notes, annotations and errant characters are excised. The reader is not required to jump around the text reading footnotes and commentary in order to comprehend it: the reading process itself has been modernised. While in early printed texts the bibliographic codes encourage a reection on the act of reading, a typical modern edition engenders a very different reading process.121 Modern editions, products of the mass market, have sought to cut out an active response to the text’s own discursive acts by presenting the ‘story’ as a self-enclosed unit, creating a text of suspended belief for the reader. In doing so, they have created the ction of a story over the more socio-historically grounded

119 Jerome McGann, “How to Read a Book,” in David Oliphant and Robin Bradford, eds., New Directions in Textual Studies (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990), 26. 120 Editorial praxis departs from traditional scholarly writings here. Where early versions of texts were usually referred to by a year name (e.g. the Guangxu 14 Huayue hen etc.), that particular text/novel dating from the time of its inscription in print, this role has been subsumed by the publisher’s name. The earliest known inscription was usually taken as the ‘date’ of a given work, and changes introduced by subsequent compositors acknowledged by the renaming of texts with new date labels. This older practice acknowledged that copies are not identical, and that versions are particular instances of a novel, a realisation occluded by the modern editions. 121 But see, however, series such as the Beijing tushuguan cang Zhenben xiaoshuo congkan, which present photocopied reproductions of early published texts. These are ostensibly much closer to the ‘originals’ in presentation, but are still in multiple-volume editions where each volume is not necessarily consonant with one work, placing a text alongside another work identied as similar. Although the photostat format ensures each page is laid out as the original and the impression is given that this is a reproduction of the text, in fact not every page (including colophons etc.) of the earlier text is necessarily present. The relocation of ‘original’ texts within a series of highly valued works in uniform covers itself alters the nature of reception.

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writings of the authors, and re-created their authors, once complicit in the reading process of the text, as storytellers. A discernible trend has been a downplaying of textuality in the editions over the course of the twentieth century—that is, of the reference the text makes to itself as a text. The editor and punctuator are prominently named on the earliest texts, signalling the process of compilation and production, but removed in later versions, according to prevalent custom. The ‘novel’ covers a relatively small volume of text in earlier editions, but expands to ll almost the whole book in a modern version. Scholarly treatment of texts has varied widely across the twentieth century in both the West and China, with new generations of academics rewriting the rules of transmission, and new editors paring down or annotating up texts to appeal to changing taste. The only immutable law of the textual condition, writes Jerome McGann, is the law of change.122 A continuous process of development and mutation accompanies each text, bounded by the socio-historic conditions under which it is produced. A text constantly undergoes “continuous and discontinuous transience as it ages, is altered by editors and conservators, and is resituated or reterritorialised in different publications and exhibition spaces.”123 This view conrms each edition of a text as a unique occurrence, while foregrounding the process of textual editing and production as a site for study. The critic no longer asks whether a certain editor is right to emend a text in a particular way, or how a ‘true’ text should look, but what has informed or constrained given editorial choices. As the text is recongured in each edition, the search for authorial intention and such questions which so preoccupied an earlier generation of scholars retreat into the critical background. The quest is no longer to trace an archetypal Ur-text, or to determine the textual version closest to the nal intention of the author by combining readings of the earliest extant manuscript and print versions,124 122

McGann, The Textual Condition, 9. Joseph Grigely, Textualterity (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 1. 124 The method advocated by W.W. Greg, which remained inuential in critical editing for decades and was incorporated into the so-called Greg-Bowers theory of transmission. The “substantives” of an edition were to be taken from the latest authorial edited manuscript version, but the “accidentals” from the earliest print version; as authorial corrections to early print proofs were thought less likely to pick up on spelling and punctuation errors than substantive changes to meanings. For a discussion see G. Thomas Tanselle, “The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention,” in Tanselle, Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing (Charlottesville, VA: University Press 123

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but to account for the existence and reception of the plurality of texts comprising any given novel. 4.3.1

Modern Editions and the Place of the Author

The authority of the text, both in the sense of the nature of authorship and of attestation to the authenticity and veracity of the narrative, is such a prominent feature of most of the red-light novels that the modest critical attention the works have attracted has been directed to this perspective. Perhaps because of the over-abundance of oblique references to authorship in the courtesan works, editors have seen little need to question their own stance towards the author and textual authority. In the 1990s editions of red-light novels, the question has been not so much one of nal authorial intention as whether authorial intention has any relevance to the process at all. The standard policy as described in prefaces has been to select one of the multiple versions of early texts and manuscripts, usually the earliest printed text, and collate against one later edition. The editors make no case for a systematic noting down of MS comparisons, or for producing stemmas or diagrammatic genealogies of prior texts. Lack of attention to authorial intention signals an absence of detailed textual research, but also of belief in a need to reach or regain the text that the author wrote. Author and text remain critically separate. Although the author appears in several novels as a character within his text, often where the text itself appears in miraculous fashion without human intervention, editors seem to have distanced themselves from earlier texts. The text itself produces its own authority, in whatever version, or edition. It is tempting to ascribe this to the legacy of ‘unauthored’ vernacular ction, but the relatively detailed biographical notes on the author that accompany each novel suggest alternative causes. Several of the 1990s introductions to a work like Huayue hen recreate the historical background to the work by situating the author in a general description of economic and political trends in nineteenthcentury China, and introducing him as a studious Confucian scholar. Prefaces written by the author and his contemporaries, which condi-

of Virginia, 1990), 27. Accuracy in transmitting accidentals in courtesan novels has been subsumed under the grosser (mis)representation of massive textual emendations of prologues and such.

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tioned earlier readings, may be discarded or re-positioned within the text. The themes which they raise (in the case of Huayue hen, fate, and the individual’s response to it) are no longer highlighted for the late twentieth-century reader, and a much stronger emphasis on authorial biography emerges as an explanatory factor in the ction. Whereas an edition from the 1930s might signal the status of the work by including an extensive commentary and a kaozheng section, a late twentieth-century edition often elevates the author to the same end. This modern reader of a Huayue hen is encouraged to view the novel as the self-analysis of a historical gure, but prevented from carrying out such a task by the means available to former readers by the excision of much of the selfreferential material outside the main story-text. 4.3.2

Removing the Prefaces: A Case Study

Throughout this volume, the importance of how authors conceived of their texts to the writing of their ction has been stressed. Prefaces, seemingly meaningless stretches of lists, the inclusion of a variety of non-prose materials, paratextual materials, the context of the text: all have been seen to be instrumental in the construct of ction to how authors created their sense of self as an author, and chose to relate the text and ction to their own lives. Where a translator like Eileen Chang removes the prologue to Haishang hua liezhuan because it is “clearly at variance with the moralistic introduction, which is just the routine disclaimer of all traditional novels that touch on the subject of sex,” and “would bore foreign readers”125 her beliefs in the freedom to improve a text are entirely congruent with those of recent Mainland editors. The effect of framing chapters has been discussed at length above with regard to the narrator and to structure, but a closer look at authorial and other prefaces shows that the principle holds true for materials outside the numbered chapters, and that the removal of prefatorial material might greatly alter the reading of a text. To take Huayue hen as an example: the 1888 edition is a fairly representative, highly textualised traditional work, with superscript commentary and punctuation markings or emphasis circles alongside characters, and a series of prefaces, poems and anecdotes that make up most of the rst fascicle of the novel. The novel proper, in the sense adopted by a

125

Han Bangqing, Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, xxii.

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pared-down modern edition, begins only after a long series of poems and comments of endorsement from friends and acquaintances. These prefaces framed and informed the reading process for nineteenth-century readers. The most important are the two of the author, and a third by the writer of the commentary to this edition. The rst of the two authorial prefaces to Huayue hen, both dated during the year of xianfeng wuwu 鹹豐戊午 (1848), speaks of the vagaries of fortune, with reference to the changing careers and fates of the two main male characters. Throughout the two prefaces the author holds in tension belief in a fate which conditions events, with an afrmation of the ability of the individual to respond to and affect his own circumstances. Events and forces in the lives of the four protagonists lie precisely on the boundaries between right and wrong, between union and separation, postulates the author, before explaining this statement through a description of the careers and fates of Wei Chizhu and Han Hesheng. The appropriate responses of the men regarding their very different fates are contrasted with the effects that transposing the two men would have had on their relationships with their two courtesan lovers. If Chizhu had had the career and fortune of Hesheng, then Qiuhen could not but have remained with him, and if Hesheng had been transformed into Chizhu with his lack of ne houses and steeds, then Caiqiu could not but have left him. The author describes how in another age all of the ne brothels and monasteries will be empty and decayed, but people will see their own loves and hates in circumstances similar to those of his protagonists, and be moved by tales of bones and dust. “Rights and wrongs, partings and unions: the one who speaks of these is without fault, and the one who listens is provided sufcient warning” he concludes. This view of the events of life developed in the second preface is transformed by modern commentators into a harangue against the examination system which condemned Wei Xiuren to a life of unfullled wishes and wasted talent, and turned him into the Chizhu of life gazing at his more fortunate alter ego Hesheng, in a reading which confuses the frames of reference between novel and biography, characters and life. The author claims only to see, and to translate what he has seen in the world into his novel: its tone is resigned rather than self-pitying. The important thing is one’s response to what fate serves, a message lost in the more politicised preface of later editions. Having framed the tale as his own construction and sketched some moral and philosophical pointers towards a reading of the novel, the

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author discusses the naming of the book and the meaning of each character of the title (moon, ower, scar/vestige). The mood is one of jocular pedantry, which soon returns to the same themes of fate and human life. This is less a Confucian representation of his work126— that is left to the commentator in the third preface—than an aesthetic theory of resonances, where physical properties remain after the event by their traces in the mind. The author alludes to the power of memories in creating the individual and how the novel explores the effect that recalled memories have on the individual. Beauty is impermanent, yet permanent in the mind of the person who possesses qing. There is no security in the events of this oating life, but neither is fate absolute. The novel is called Huayue hen, Vestiges of the owers and moon, and was written “in order to speak of vestiges, and certainly not of owers and the moon.” The owers and moon that the author has in mind are, he claims, physical objects, in their blossoming and fruition, waxing and waning. The vestige, or scar (hen) is different, an explanation of its nature lying in the natures of the ower and the moon. “If a ower is reected in a mirror, when the mirror is empty the ower disappears; if the moon is reected in water, when the water stirs the moon disperses: this is the explanation of vestiges.” When a ower blossoms, the fact that it must fall is certainly something in accord with its nature. Since people do not wish to see it wither, its vestiges thus constantly remain. It is indeed true of the moon that when it is full it will inevitably wane, but since people don’t wish it to wane, the vestiges remain. Thus, for someone without feeling (qing), even though owers may be blooming and the moon full, it remains a desolate scene. For a person with feeling, even if the moon has waned and the owers withered it is still a wonderful world for them. This is speaking on the basis of principle. When we look at it from the point of view of this book, the reason Han and Du can never be parted is because their vestiges are rmly joined together. The fact that Wei and Liu could never be together is because their vestiges are securely separated. However, cause and effect in the human world have not ended. The traces of our oating life cannot be xed. . . . . When we build together our gold pavilion, why does it have to be on the ocean of the fragrant sea? When we lift up again the amber curtain why does it have to be a play in our dreams? Traces of

126 Buddhist terms such as ‘cause and effect’ do appear in the preface, which does not however present a consistent Buddhist philosophy, with Daoist overtones also present.

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chapter four tears? Traces of blood? Traces of wine? Traces of the moon and owers? I am about to consign them all to the great void, but wish to end my days with the owers and moon of my mind.127

The reference to re-enacting events in dreams questions whether such things cannot also happen again in real life. In putting pen to paper, the author is not describing the real moon and owers, “for everyone can see those, and speak of them, so why should I bother to write them down?” but the emotional traces of them which live on in our minds and have an existence of their own. The world of love and the brothel lingers in the mind long after its substance has faded away. An inscription by commentator Xixiajushi 栖霞居士, in which he begins by pointing out that the novel could be read by shallow people as nothing but “admiring talent and envying beauty,” directs readers beyond this. The root of the matter, he claims, lies in an explication of the ve Confucian relationships and the four cardinal virtues.128 Xixiajushi describes the failure of the protagonist Wei Chizhu to attain a full measure of the requisite virtue in any of these sets of relationships, and the effect that this lack of opportunity to develop right relationships had on his character. Troubles pressed in on Wei all around, and “as a subject he did not attain a desired level of loyalty, but must have wanted to be loyal; as a father and son he did not attain the appropriate level of liality and love, but must have wanted to be lial and loyal.” The commentator stresses the author’s comparison of the two sets of relationships, and the skilful use he makes of contrast, concluding that although the novel form is xiaodao (a “minor way,” i.e. not canonical literature), it can still teach the world, exhort to good and punish evil. The understanding of the novel and its purpose expressed in this brief colophon accords much more closely with the views of later critics and commentators than the authorial prefaces, and provides the impetus for a dualistic reading which gradually becomes associated with a split authorial psyche.

127 The preface echoes Su Shi’s famous poem on the universal nature of separation linking the phases of the moon to partings and human transience (“For human beings, there are sorrows and joys, separations and unions/for the moon, there are cloudy and clear skies, waxing and waning phases . . .”), for translation see Kang-I Sun Chang, The Late Ming Poet Ch’en Tzu-lung: Crises of Love and Loyalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 79. 128 I.e. benevolence of ruler/loyalty of subject; love and respect between father and son; friendship of brothers; harmony between husband and wife; trust of friends. The virtues are: benevolence, righteousness, loyalty and reciprocity.

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In contrast, a 1932 edition presents the prefaces and colophons of the earliest printed version, and also adds a section of textual research (kaozheng) and a commentary (zhuiyu 贅語, superuous words). These simultaneously historicise the novel and re/present it to a contemporary audience. The section of textual research includes a biography of the author, anecdotes about the author, a critical essay on the book and a note on the poems in the novel. The novel is now not merely a story to be read, but a text with a history to be analysed in terms of what the editors regard as interesting or important. A detailed understanding of the background, life and career of the author is deemed the primary aid to that reading process. This includes comments on his moral nature, his aspirations and virtues. This biography, and those of the following two editions are textual reconstructions, creating rather than recovering the author, selecting representative anecdotes and episodes in the light of editorial agenda. A paragraph entitled “An index to the whole novel” rejects the theory that Wei Chizhu represents the situation of the author, contesting that the author was comparing himself to both main protagonists, drawing on other examples of character-author resonance in Honglou meng and Yesou puyan 野叟曝言 (An old countryman airs his speech). While the text is heavily annotated, editorial responsibility does not extend to providing an explanation of the provenance of the text, of alternative sources or versions, or of any emendations made. The editor has unquestioned authority in reading the text, and his area of responsibility in publishing an edition resides in presenting extra-textual details and biographical information to his reader. The novel has become an object for critical study, and the original prefaces which commented on the text are supplemented by further comment on their author. The 1993 Shanghai Guji text presents a narrower denition of the text of the novel, consisting of the story chapters alone. There are no prefaces or colophons in difcult and off-putting classical Chinese. These are replaced by a publisher’s explanation and a preface. The rst is a four-page analysis of why these books as a series (the Ten Great Classical Social Human-sentiment Novels) are being brought out, justifying the project through an analysis of the history and position of these ten novels in the history of Chinese literature, and “to enable readers to have a deeper understanding of Chinese traditional ction.” The emphasis throughout the preface is on the necessity of responding to readers’ requests, and readers’ needs. A discussion of genre and the many different names and classications of such works precedes a history of the traditional novel from Jin Ping Mei to Jiu wei gui.

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This brief exposition of the history of novels is shaped by a belief in the validity and success of the project of bringing the ten works of the series, as representatives of superior examples of their type, before the public. The appearance of brothel literature is said to have resulted from readers tiring of the content of scholar-beauty novels, as Lu Xun rst proposed. Pinhua baojian and Huayue hen are described as directly transferring the attributes and characteristics of beauties ( jiaren) to prostitutes, retaining the same style as earlier works. Huayue hen, along with Qinglou meng and Pinhua baojian, are representative of the transition period in caizi jiaren works from Honglou meng to modern ‘Buttery’ works.129 Classication provides a pseudo-academic rationale for a populist text, and the educational project is fullled via a sketch of four hundred years of literary history. Readers who have purchased other works in the Shanghai Guji series presumably skip the repeated editorial explanation, but the second preface is specic to the individual novel. This preface echoes, without attribution, the rst authorial preface of the 1888 text in its biography of the main characters, but without the reection or analysis that the author provides. Changes in prefaces here produce changes in both text and genre. The meaning of the novel, the new preface explains, lies in its expression of resentment at wasted talent, and not in the biography of courtesans it presents. This assertion is followed by a biography of the author, setting the novel in the context of his life and experiences, including the fact that he lived through the two Opium Wars and the Taiping “peasant uprising” during the 1840s to 1860s, environment providing a causal explanation of ctional events. According to the preface writer, Wei Xiuren was “both pained at the decline and impotency of the Qing dynasty and resentful of the lack of use made of his talent.”130 The link between biography and autobiography is made very explicit for the reader: “Wei Chizhu and Han Hesheng in the book are in fact his envisioning and medium for the two futures of poverty and success.” The preface writer Shang Cheng 尚成 develops this thesis, showing how the author has displaced his ideals of hopes for a revival of China and of individuals establishing

129 Shang Cheng, preface to Wei Xiuren, Huayue hen (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji, 1994), qianyan, 3. 130 Shang Cheng, preface to Wei Xiuren, Huayue hen, qianyan, 2.

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merit in Han Hesheng’s suppression of internal troubles and external threats, and how through Wei he examines the situations of those whose ambition and talent nd no outlet. Shang contends that the narrative focuses on Wei Chizhu, as in him the autobiographical project is most fully developed. Both the 1996 Zhonghua Shuju and Shanghai Guji editions present lengthy biographies, and conclude their prefaces with comments on the derivation of the novel, considering it in terms of afliation to scholarbeauty literature, and as an offshoot of Honglou meng. The emphasis on biography all but precludes other potential explanatory models for the novel. Reasons for certain narrative events are read into the novel through suggested parallels with incidents in Wei’s life, suppositions about his mental state and external circumstances. Selected quotations are used to substantiate the claim that Huayue hen is an autobiographical work, and from this explanation an ideology of the text is derived. The modern reader of Huayue hen is encouraged to view the novel as the self-analysis of a historical gure, but such a task is warped by the editorial promotion of the analysis as contained only within the ctive narrative. 4.3.3

Modern Editorial Approaches

Western debates from earlier in the twentieth century over establishing an inferential authorial fair copy have few parallels in recent Chinese editorial approaches, which tend towards a more postmodern (or, indeed, pre-modern Chinese) acceptance of textual plurality and egality. If producing an edition is one way of producing literary meaning, then many of the modern versions arrogate authorial responsibility to themselves.131 Recent textual critics have painstakingly shown how changes of meaning are introduced to a text even in such minor alterations as changing individual characters, or using variant readings or forms. (An extreme example of this, an editorial choice between an ‘n’ and a ‘u’ in Othello’s nal soliloquy, changes a reading from Indian to Judean, from remorse to self-justication: on this quibble hangs our reading of the tragic hero’s character).132 Where minor typographical

131

Cf. McGann, The Textual Condition, 31. See Tom Davis, “The Monsters and the Textual Critics,” in Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger, eds., Textual Formations and Reformations (Newark, DL: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 96–97. 132

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or epigraphical changes are acknowledged, they may be justied by editors as producing better readings. Questions such as whether the editor can presume to alter an author’s decision, or what constitutes the ultimate form of an author’s text, become less relevant where the form of a work is not presupposed to accord more to authorial design than any other vision. This position is not the stated one of the late twentieth-century editors of red-light novels, but can be read into their nished editions. While the bibliographical codes of the 1888 Fujian Wu Yu Tian edition of Huayue hen have been transformed in almost every conceivable way by the 1994 Shanghai Guji version, the editors of this latter still list the emendations as minor alterations to the novel. In a similar vein, a modern Qilu Shushe edition of Qinglou meng describes how Zou Tao’s commentary has been excised to accommodate the readers’ needs, and then continues: Apart from this, other than adding modern punctuation, and changing long-form characters to short-form, and correcting variant characters for standard ones, we have completely retained the original appearance of the copytext (diben 底本) and have not allowed corrections at will, only making necessary corrections, consulting another edition ( jiaoben 校本) in the case of incomprehensible sections in the copytext.133

Critics such as Thomas Tanselle have dismissed editorial claims which adduce “the reader’s convenience” as the rationale for normalising a text. Such a position, he claims, “involves two curious assumptions:rst, that the reader’s convenience sometimes takes precedence over textual accuracy; second, that certain acts of punctuation and spelling are not signicant parts of the original and can therefore be altered without altering a reader’s understanding of the text.”134 The misguided assistance rendered to a reader is, claims Tanselle, generally superuous. If alterations are made for the reader’s benet, the preface to the Shanghai Guji series of social-sentiment novels also begins with the claim that the series is being published in response to readers’ demands.135 Another repeated reason for publications is didactic value. The publish-

133 Qinglou meng (Shandong: Qilu Shushe, 1993), 243. Zou Tao was, as noted above, himself a well-known literary gure, whose oeuvre included two red-light works, Haishang deng shi lu 海上燈市錄 and Haishang chentian ying. 134 Tanselle, Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing, 9. 135 See e.g. Jiu wei gui (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji, 1994), Chuban Shuoming 1.

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ing notes to the Taiwan Hanyuan Wenhua edition of Fengyue meng in its series of Ming and Qing novels open by placing the novel as one in a series to be presented to the reader by the library and publishing house. The stated justication for such a sequence lies in its educative value, lling in the gaps in the knowledge of the young where these do not extend beyond San guo yanyi, Shuihu zhuan and Honglou meng, and in presenting works which were once in themselves inuential.136 This educational mission is a continuation of centuries-old ideas on the production of anthologies and canonical series.137 The proliferation of publishers bringing out editions of one or several of these works does somewhat undermine claims to furthering educational needs by making available undiscovered texts. While the identity of the readers supposedly demanding such novels and desiring them in an easy and convenient format is never revealed, the widespread availability of red-light texts throughout major chains of bookshops does suggest that their market surveys are not far off the mark. The minor character emendations that most of the modern editors acknowledge are often far less numerous than those of the intermediate editions. A comparison of two chapters of the Shanghai Guji and the Guangyi Shuju versions of Huayue hen, for example, reveals around forty differences in one chapter (Chapter Seven) and sixty in the other (Chapter Fifteen). This number includes instances of reversed character order, omissions and accidental or incorrect characters, but not repeated alterations or vocabulary substitutions. The vast majority of differences between either of these two texts and the 1888 Wu Yu Tian edition are alterations in style or vocabulary in the earlier not the modern text. Some of the differences are simple typographical errors, some are synonyms, and in the modern edition, replacement characters for unfamiliar vocabulary (e.g. yingwu 鸚鵡 for yingge 英哥) or to make reading simpler for readers (such as replacing niwo 你我 with zanmen 咱們). As for the claims of the editors not to have altered or excised any large sections of texts, these appear to be borne out by a cross-checking of sample

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Fengyue meng (Taibei: Hanyuan Wenhua, 1993), 3–5. Pauline Yu writes that “even in the Qing pedagogical concerns remained paramount” after describing the educational mission of anthologists from the Tang onwards, where the readers was aided through more heavily punctuated and annotated editions. Pauline Yu, “Canon Formation in Late Imperial China,” in Theodore Huters, R. Bin Wong, Pauline Yu, eds., Culture and State in Chinese History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 97–98. 137

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chapters. A selection of Chapters 15, 20 and 37 for comparison on the grounds that their content matter might have indicated a removal of sexually explicit material, demonstrates that the modern text proves to be complete, and the novel as chaste as promoted. Any form of publication entails loss: transcription from manuscript to print removes traces of crossings out, and aberrant spellings or punctuation are often altered. While Mainland editors have paid lip-service to faithful transcription of characters and sentences,138 the desirability of close transcription of spatial or physical features of texts has not been addressed. Aside from the import of the litany of changes following the “other than” clause in the above statement by Zou Tao, the “retention of the original appearance” neglects to mention such obvious but crucial facts as the original text being inscribed vertically, read from right to left, in several stitch-bound volumes, in pages of very few characters, on fragrant, quality paper, with all of the colophons etc. mentioned above. The statement hides its contradictions: the belief in a literary work as a mutable entity that can be reissued and altered at will stalls against this insistence that the original is somehow being retained in the given version. 4.3.4

Serial Editions

A nal aspect of the modern editions that merits further consideration is their publication in series, with a serial introduction and physically similar covers and design. In the course of exploring how the physical form of the red-light novel has developed, it becomes clear that the idea of this category of novel as a genre has in part contributed to the material format of the novels, just as the serial nature of editions has contributed to the works being seen as a genre. Editors and critics have colluded in this circularity, since Lu Xun rst classied the texts as a group in the 1920s. In terms of classication, genre is a text-

138 For example, the Fengyue meng edition described here claims: “For the sake of scholarly research and preservation, in the process of arranging [the text] we have not made any abridgements, and in order to save space, apart from a couple of instances, we have not made any text-critical notes (校記): these ought all to be made clear” (p. 5). Wang Chirun, writing a note on the punctuation of the Qilu Shushe Pinhua baojian acknowledges, in common with most editors, that some alterations have been made: “Where the copytext is intelligible, no corrections have been made; where the copytext has wrong characters or expressions which are not complete, then, in consultation with other editions or internal evidence from the copytext, we have made careful corrections” (p. 514).

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specic category. Where genre has not been recognised as editorially imposed, but believed to be inherent in the literary works themselves, questions arise. The impact of publication as one work in a series of like texts becomes apparent in a reading of the editorial prefaces to the modern novels. The editorial prefaces (chuban shuoming, or publisher’s explanation) in a series such as the Shanghai Guji Ten Classical Social Humansentiment Novels are identical across the ten novels and novellas. The primary identity of any given novel is as one in this series of given works, selected by this editorial team, rather than as the unique work of an individual author. This is not to say that the various series which contain courtesan works include all of a recognisable set, or all of the novels Lu Xun classied as xiaxie. In the early 1990s several of the newly published series did contain variants on this list, or gathered volumes from among it alongside other novels, usually either caizi jiaren or late Qing works of a similar theme, but many of the more recent publications of the six novels have been not in thematic series, but in series of great works of a period. This possibly suggests a shift in editorial policy away from recognition as courtesan novels, but another explanation lies in the visibility of novels. As proven sales successes, the works have now attained a certain status as prominent novels of the Qing period. Such prominence affects critical reaction to the works, and as they are subsequently chosen as representative novels of the period as a whole, their new status is assured. Publication in set genres or as series of titles raises the issues of textual authority and of the editorial vision of authorship, in ways which are not always signalled by the editions themselves. Here lies the tension and contradiction of the modern editions: they proclaim an authenticity that derives from the authorial tag, while implicitly privileging the text itself as the site of its own authority. The editors’ and publishers’ own role in re/creating a novel such as Huayue hen is minimised and disguised, in a policy which denies this novel to be a function of their production and their interests, and attempts to ascribe it to a reinstated author-gure. This is odd because the many available editions implicitly posit a critical position where the intentions of the author/artist are not primary considerations for editors. While the modern edition is presented to us as the work of a given individual, little serious attempt is usually made to justify the particular readings given in terms of delity to the manuscript, or intentions, of that author. In spite of a dissonance between the edited modern texts and ostensible

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professions of closeness to early manuscripts, there is little debate in editorial notes over the status of the text. In critical writings there is no obvious corollary to the debates of western critics over the last couple of decades on authorial intention and to the tortuous quests for a best text, casting light on the particular nature of courtesan ction and the social standing of its authors. 4.4

Conclusions

The dramatic nature of the courtesan texts is a conscious ction, a dramatising of the narrative which calls attention to the process of production and reception. Immanent in several of the features of narrative structure in the novels—such as poetry, songs and riddles—is this sense of the text aunting its own modes of transmission. Coupled with scenes of live acts or plays within the text, the exploration of the text-audience interface should be posited as a major interest of many red-light novelists, and one that informed the pattern of their writing. This assumption is strengthened by the emphasis on the transmission of the physical text, discussed in the previous chapter on narration, and by the framing devices which create another layer of reality within the texts. These frames include the overlay of a supernatural world above or behind the immediate reality of events, and the implied or actual presence of the author in his text. The changes in format of ction published at the turn of the century had notable effects on narrative, many of which were transferred back into later book-form editions. Two prime differences stemming from serial publication are increases in length and the addition of illustrations throughout the text. Other changes in narrative which appeared in tandem with new textual forms, but for which external changes cannot necessarily be regarded as causative, include greater use of dialect in literature, and innovative means of structuring the chronology of narratives. Both of these features are seen to full effect in the novels Haishang hua liezhuan and Jiu wei gui. At the same time, aspects of narrative structure which had typied the earlier red-light works, such as poetry and drama inserts, fade out of the novels, though sometimes to a lesser extent than modern editions or translations would suggest. This can be seen as a result of narrative experimentation, but also as a function of context: with relationships newly formed in an urban

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brothel environment, there was less call for erudition as novels no longer depicted genteel gatherings of educated men and women in leisured settings. If characters’ inner psychological states could be dramatised through dialogue, as demonstrated in Haishang hua liezhuan, then there was no need to resort to a borrowed poetic voice, which was in any case anachronistic among the calibre of prostitutes commonly met. If readers were now conversant with the notion of a self-contained, ctive ction, then the insertion of multiple texts was an unnecessary impediment, and the narrative could continue unadorned. At the level of narrative structure, a neat divide between the two streams of romantic and realistic courtesan novel is scarcely tenable. No one set of narrative means is exclusive to either type, and there is a large common pool of devices for creating the illusion of reality or ction in a text. As each text constructs its own mode of representation, individual creativity and a drawing on traditional structures are both apparent. While there might be closer resonance between two more realistic works describing the inner workings of middle-rank brothels than with the self-indulgent works which glorify the courtesans’ nery and exalt the male lover, these differing emphases nd similar narrative expressions within a transcendent concern for the representation of creative ction. The identication of ction by type is only a product of the number and strength of links uncovered, whether consciously inserted by the author or detected by a critic. Where similar structural means are used to different ends, it is more interesting to consider how the authors worked within and against traditions of narrative to produce the literary effects they sought. We can assume that the authors delighted less in anticipated categorisation in literary anthologies, than in considered dialogue between textual traditions and creativity, between the craft of writing and the essence of what the author intended to transmit. The bindings of continuity with previous red-light novels can be lost in the dazzle of change. Reading red-light ction in new media alongside previous courtesan novels gives a more balanced view of novelty. The exciting new forms in which red-light ction was published on the eve of the twentieth century mask some of these continuities, such as in the representation of ction. Where boxed narratives were once dug up from the ground, later authors might comment on the ction of the text by a frame in which the writer submits for publication a narrative to a serial magazine of the same name as that which

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the reader is reading.139 The downgrading of poetry, drama and other textual incursions by the end of the nineteenth century does not so much signal a move away from interest in the nature of ction, as a change in its form. Where a medley of textual forms once pointed to the ction of the text, language and dialect began at the very end of the Qing to create a dramatised text, and interwoven stories caused readers to ponder the clever construct of chronology. Factors external to narrative, such as magazine publication and photographic illustrations, kept readers fully attuned to the interplay of text and ction in the new era of print production. The phenomenon of the wide-scale re-issue of Qing courtesan works was a further development in the surprisingly long-lived dissemination of these novels, attesting to a change in understanding of the function of literature, now allowed to be a playful pastime, and to the sense that Qing ction has a perceived didactic value as a historical form. The publication of mass-market, cheap gaudy editions favours the rst, while the publishers’ notes in those same works posit their value entirely in literary and educational terms. The texts themselves convey the values of editors and literary critics: the congruence of a revival of interest in the nineteenth century among literary critics with a new spate of publications from that period makes it difcult to gauge which came rst. The modern editions compound this paradox: they are both highly commercial editions and often produced under the joint auspices of a university and a commercial press. While the complex and innovative features of the narratives of many red-light novels provide reason enough for their elevation from the shelves of hackneyed romances, further grounds are seen in the material forms and extra-textual components of the novels. Some of these ‘extra-textual’ features may be external only to late editions of the works. Prefaces, colophons and even illustrations present in early printed editions have been excised from many modern texts. It is, however, precisely in such features of the texts, beyond the narrow storyline encapsulated within the 32 to 192 hui, that pointers to the status of the text and value judgements of editors and publishers may be seen. Through diachronic study of the bibliographical codes of the texts in their various manifestations, it can be seen that the perception of these novels as debased and of little artistic worth is text-specic, related 139 As in the case of Wu Jingren’s Ershi nian mudu zhi quai xianzhuang of 1903–06, 1906–10.

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most closely to modern editions. This perception has been retroactively imposed on the whole history of the novels, and prompts the conclusion that it is through the (extra)-textual features of specic editions that the generic entity ‘the courtesan novel’ has been propagated. As the text evolves, its meaning evolves; each edition produces only a temporary stasis in its presentation of textual meaning. For most modern versions of red-light novels, this textual stasis is very brief, particularly given a situation where so many versions are on the market concurrently. The novel itself is a series, composed of acts of variance. The differences that create a new text do not corrupt the old, but embody the social or economic reasons for the new edition. The abstract notion of the ‘text’ of a novel only exists in as much as it is xed anew in each edition: it is the particular inscription which creates a work. These particular inscriptions or textual manifestations of nineteenth-century red-light novels have been moulded into generic or series readings in the late twentieth century by such quasi-textual features as cover and preface. The textual instability demonstrated across the chronological history of a work such as Huayue hen suggests that meaning too is viewed as conditional or transitory. The meaning of the text has been read differently in different periods and this is naturally reected in the editions produced. What is galling in the modern versions is the lack of acknowledgement of this fact: each edition reads as the denitive, authoritative version, with few references to previous texts, or to the formulae which create meaning deployed by editors of each new version. Editors who include forewords are adopting a literary critical function, but rarely concede their role in the history of the novel. The texts of these courtesan novels self-consciously encourage a reection on the process of reading through such means as poetry or the gure of the narrator, but the pared-down modern editions have deected an active response to the text’s own discursive acts. Modern courtesan novel editions have reinvested authority in the author gure, yet there has been only a partial attempt to reproduce what the author wrote and the text has been constructed as producing its own authority. The meaning of a work is not dened by authorial intention but by the meaning imputed by the particular preface-writer of each edition. Editorial, rather than authorial, practices have created post facto a genre out of dispersed texts: this is not a unitary grouping, but many overlapping genres and series. The editors of the Shanghai Guji series preface are right in saying that there is no one name for these ‘social human-sentiment’ novels. There is no courtesan

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genre, and has not been even since Lu Xun’s denitive presentation of xiaxie works, but everywhere always are attempts to create meaning for individual texts as one in a given series of works. The creation of courtesan novels as works in categories has inuenced the degrading of the original, or authorial, text as a true reading to be consulted and carefully reproduced. Authority for modern Chinese editions lies with the current editor, who is neither bound to the author nor to previous editors. This separation of textual authority from a notion of the author’s intended text suggests that the text is regarded as reconstitutable in China, as indeed the vernacular text of a non-literatus author was for much of recorded literary history. Authority has been dispersed, from author to printing house to editor, and the new textual canon features works with differing notions of authority. Traces of a split can be seen in the current cultural remaking of classical texts, which are both a cheap source of publishing revenue and a means of guiding readers closer to their cultural heritage: these functions are divided among editions, but with a price differential tipping the balance of authority towards the more expensive scholarly editions. The question “What is the modern Chinese editorial conception of the literary text?” nds several answers given differing editorial policies, but in the majority of cases, where novels are published as one in a series, textual relations are built up synchronically, not with antecedent texts of the same novel but via other texts of a similar time period, chosen by the editors. The history of the courtesan novel provides an insight into the history of editorial/critical reaction to this form of novel. Links between text, genre and authority are shown to be precarious. The idea of a mini-canon of courtesan works, formed of those novels which are published repeatedly by different publishers under various serial rubrics (social-sentiment novels, Qing dynasty romances, great classical works etc.) is linked to the reproduction of these works as those of named authors. The modern editions all name the author on the cover, and have edited the works so as to highlight the biography of the individual author. In all but the earliest texts, the biography of the author is taken to be the single most determinate explanatory factor for a given novel. Although the life of the author is read into his novel where at all possible, the import of his writing and choice of friends to annotate his text (where he had any control) are minimised. In the degree of alteration to the bibliographic codes of the novels, a reading

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of the linguistic codes has also been modied. The author is promoted as the creator of this unique, unitary text, and then quietly effaced. Status shifts which are evident in the format of the novels reinforce notions of a canon comprised of prominent individuals. A most unlikely canon of failed examinees writing of their brothel years has been created through the attention paid to the authors as individuals and through attempts to homogenize their experiences and narratives in series of publications. This accords with the emphasis of the modern editions on biography and the promotion of the didactic value of the novels. This emphasis on biography has traditionally been the literary critic’s answer to the longevity of the red-light novel. Present-day readers might be attracted more by the cover image showing the alien world of the courtesan house, and its promise of loves and losses.

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INDEX

baihua, 11, 119, 190, 244 betrayal, 31, 164, 168n, 169, 225 bibliographic codes, xix, 272 biji, 20, 244 biography, 38n, 72, 81, 91, 94, 97, 100, 118, 134, 136, 141, 154–5, 176, 188; authorial, 119, 257–8, 261–3, 272–3 bodies: as canvas, 132; as capital, 165, as text, 175–6 book trade, 8, 59n, 61, 198, 239 book-making, 87 Brokaw, Cynthia, 59n brothels: brothel sex, xiv, 98; organisation, 162n; community, 161

dispersal, 199; stock characters, 177; anti-heroic, 128–9 Chartier, Roger, 23, 24n Chen Pingyuan, 2n, 6n, 8, 10n, 15, 149n, 199 Chen Sen, 15, 107–8, 113, 130n, 176, 190n, 216, 226 Cheng, Stephen, xiv, 100, 111n, 113, 211, 245 Cherniack, Susan, 58n, 68–9, 70n Chia, Lucille, 59n Chizhu, 33, 80, 208 passim, 258 passim chuancha, 110, 112, 177 Confucian, 32, 34n, 44, 52, 63, 68n, 94n, 144, 259–60; scholars, 70, 102n, 256; Neo-confucian, 54, 103, 243; orthodoxy, 129; values, 135; wives, 135, 144, 171, 195 congshu, 63, 71 copyright, 60n, 64, 66 passim, 133n courtesan: as literati muse, xix, 166, 249 courtesan novel: denitions see esp. 18–24 passim, also 1–4, 35–36, 48 passim, 267 passim; Shanghai courtesan novels, 229, 248n; new concepts 229–30

caizi jiaren, 24n, 26, 28, 33, 40–48, 104, 129–30, 144, 214, 221, 229, 262, 267 canon, canonizing, 6, 18, 26, 54–6, 59, 174n; literary, 10, 17; mini-canon, 24; non-canonical, 38, 260 Cao Xueqin, 28, 47, 51, 53, 140–1 Carlitz, Katherine, 126, 127n, 173n, 175, 219n, 222n censorship, xxii, 56, 64, 66, 97, 100, 133n, 232 Chang, Eileen, 93n, 119, 120n, 179, 217, 245, 257 characterisation, for denitions see esp. 125–9; and narrator see e.g. 76, 103; and author, 189, lists, 200; in dreams, 208; female characters e.g. 32, 53, 222; male, 32, 52; bad characters, 46, 53, 221; self-reective, 47, hypermasculine, 53, disengaged, 129; as biography, 134; reading character, 187 passim; as created beings, 192; gathering and

de Man, xxi death: see suicide Des Forges, Alexander, xvii, xviin, 63n, 64n, 74n, 92n , 94, 103, 104n, 145n, 177n, 178n, 198, 228, 237n, 238n, 242–3, 245–6, 247n desire, 4, 20, 32, 34n, 51–2, 105, 129–30, 143, 166–7, 175, 187, 218; desire and warning theme, 52; gendered desire, 47 Dickens, Charles, 239n, 240, 242, 247, 248n Dolehelová-Velingerová, 7n, 16n, 17n, 63n, 89n, 95n, 96, 100n, 124n, 199n, 201n drama: xxv, 48, 66, 71, 81, 176–7 passim, 184, 199–200, 203 passim, 210–11, 217, 219–221, 227, 245, 249, 268–70; dramatic form, 51; mimesis, 210 dreams, 36, 48–50, 74–75, 87–89, 98–101, 111, 137, 139–40, 146–7,

A Ying (Qian Xingcun), 6, 9, 9n, 17n allegory, 49, 189 Austen, Jane, 91, 92n authorship 20; how perceived, 60, 64; and authority, 67–9, 70–72, 256; and women, 175, 226, 292; and print, 231, editorial vision, 267; retreating, 87; and narrator, 88, 111; and transmission, 103–4 autobiography, 121, 136; ctionalised, 78, 91, 153; and biography, 262

288

index

152–3, 170, 177, 193, 200, 208, 224–5, 226, 245, 259–60; and truth, 132; supernatural, 134 Drège, Jean-Pierre, 55n, 56n, 60, 61n, 237n drinking games, xxv, 98, 117, 200, 210, 213, 215, 217, 219–223, 245 Dudbridge, Glen, 3n, 20n, 67n Duval, Jean, xxiin, 89n, 229n editions, 4, 14, 20, 23–24, 26, 38–40, 54–56, 63, 66–7, 75–77, 210, 231, 246–8, 268–73; effects of, 118–121; pirate, xxii; re-made, 235, 253–5; modern, 69–71, 2–4, 207, 256–8; serial, 266 passim; scholarly, 26, 272; imperially-sanctioned, 62; commentary, 68; Huayue hen editions, 256 passim editorship, 67, 68 education, 17, 57–8, 62, 67–8, 239, 262, 265, 270; and women, 44–5, 49n, 131, 150n, 170, 221 Edwards, Louise, 52n, 147 erotic, xxii, 30n, 43n, 49n, 65–66, 128, 130n, 131n, 144, 233 Ershi nian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang, 1, 63n, 75n, 92n, 93n, 270n evidential scholarship—see kaozheng femme fatale, 32 Feng Menglong, 29 passim, 68 Fenglin, 157, 164–6, 168–9, 206, 222, 224 Fengyue meng, 18, 20, 35, 37, 39, 50–51, 62, 72, 127, 130, 234–5, 152 passim ction: status of, xxiii, 6, 11, 14–16, 23–26, 35, 38, 48, 65, 68, 74, 81–2, 87, 117, 121–2, 232, 235, 237, 244, 257, 267–8, 270 owers, 152, 176 Fong, Grace, 176 frames, xiv, xxiv, 30, 50, 52, 72–3, 75, 81, 85–6, 90–96, 98, 100 passim, 122–3, 126, 137, 140, 156, 191n, 192, 196, 215, 218, 236, 243, 250, 258, 268; end, 215, 223–5; supernatural, 49–50, 228, 233 ‘frustrated scholars,’ xx, 22, 57, 175 Fujii, James A., 125n geisha, Memoirs of a Geisha, xiii gender, xvi, 20, 40, 224; transformations, 42–3; roles, 91–2, 215–6; cross-gender,

43, 47, 52–3; gendered subjectivity, 13; viewpoints, 184; emotions, 145; relations, 128–30, 141, 144, 186, 196; characterisation, 147–8, 163, 170 Genette, Gerard, 27n, 100, 107n genre, xix, 3–4, 10, 25, 29, 38, 42, 52, 78, 86–7, 103, 154, 203–4, 261–2, 266–7, 271–2; lei, xxiii, xxv, 24, 39–40; congurations, 17–18, 20, 22, 26–7, 228, 244, 246 Golden, Arthur, xiii Guanchang xianxingji, 1, 229n, 92n guanshu ju (ofcial publication bureaux), 62 guide-books to brothels, xviii, 18, 66, 96, 160 Gujin xiaoshuo, 29n, 30, 36, 37n, 38n Guo Yanli, 9n, 19n, 21, 26n, 28n Haishang hua liezhuan, xvi, xxiv, xxv, 5–6, 20, 22, 23, 63, 74–5, 87 passim, 98, 100, 103, 106, 111–3, 115, 119, 122, 128, 130, 134, 176 passim, 189, 191–6, 198, 204, 211, 225, 228–30, 240, 243–5, 247–8, 251–2, 257, 268–9 Han Bangqing, 63, 88, 110, 112–13, 119, 128, 177, 181, 184, 211, 229, 240, 243–5, 248, 252 Hanan, Patrick, 7n, 12n, 22, 23n, 29n, 30n, 34n, 35n, 36n, 38n, 74n, 92, 94, 129n, 154, 155n, 160, 178n, 212n, 228–30, 239n Haoqiu zhuan, 40–2, 44–47 Hegel, Robert E., xxvin, 16n, 17n, 41n, 62n, 94n, 129n, 203n, 224n, 234–5, 248n Henriot, Christian, xiv, xv, xvi, 131n, 144n, 149n passim, 162n passim, 170n, 182n, 221n, 249n Hershatter, Gail, xv, xvi, 131n Hessney, Richard C., 41n, 47n, 129n Hirth, F., 198 Honglou meng, xviii, xxiii, 1, 5, 24, 28, 33, 47–53, 70–71, 76, 80, 83, 100–03, 105, 122, 124, 129 passim, 146–7, 157, 188, 221, 229, 239, 261–3, 265 Hsia, C.T., 11n, 15n, 16n Hu Shi, 119, 244, 245 Hua Ye Lian Nong, 87–8, 100, 119–20, 191 Huang Jinzhu, 6–7, 16n Huang Lin, 6n Huayue hen, xxv, 2, 5, 20, 26, 32–3, 37, 39,

index 50, 62, 71–2, 74–5, 79–81, 85, 93–5, 101, 104, 117, 122, 129, 133, 148, 177, 189, 193–4, 200 passim, 214–7, 219–20, 228–30, 232, 246, 248, 253, 256–9, 262–5, 267, 271 hui yin 65 ‘human-sentiment novels,’ 4, 18, 24–5, 39–40, 261, 271 Huters, Theodore, 6n, 15n, 17n, 18n, 265n illustrations, xxv, 64, 120, 133, 237, 239, 244, 247 passim, 268, 270; images of courtesans: xiii, xv, 17, 33, 128, 132, 135–6, 141, 194, 238, 248 passim Ji Shaofu, 61n, 62n, 66n, 72n, 235n Jia Ming, 157, 159, 163–9, 194, 224 Jin Ping Mei, 65, 70, 126, 127n, 132, 203, 212n, 222n, 246n, 261 Jin Shengtan, 68 Jin Yixiang, 35, 85–6, 134–145, 204, 226 jindai, 6–7, 10, 26n Jinghua yuan, 99n, 100, 201n, 202n Jingshi tongyan, 29n, 33 junzi, 42 Kang Lixin, 6–7, 12n, 16n kaozheng, 54, 57–8, 74, 257, 261 Ko, Dorothy, xvi Kornicki, Peter, xxii, 60n, 67n, 70n late Qing, xvi, xvii, xviii, xx, xxii–iii, xxv, 1, 16–17, 19, 21, 23, 27–8, 29, 36, 43, 54, 56, 63, 73, 87, 92, 96, 107, 115, 122, 124, 129–30, 139, 145, 191, 198–9, 214, 218, 236, 244, 246–7, 251, 253, 267; for denitions see esp. 3–10, 10–14 law suits, xv, 29, 62, 155, 167n, 171, 174n Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 11n, 12n, 13, 117n, 238n, 242n, 243n Lewis, Mark, 55, 56n, 67n Li Boyuan, 63, 241 Li Ruiteng, 6–7, 10, 11n Li, Wai-yee, 50n, 80n Liang Qichao, 2, 13, 17, 63, 241, 244, 247n Liaozhai zhiyi, 189, 238 Lin Daiyu, 21, 51–2, 102, 114, 116–8, 140–1, 157, 253 linguistic codes, xix, 235, 273

289

Link, Perry, 62n, 134 literary-political discussions, 2, see also 3–10 Lu Shu, 107, 112, 155–8, 160, 164, 178, 180, 207, 222 Lu Xun, xxvi, 4, 11, 19–22, 24–26, 28, 40n, 46, 76, 96, 164, 212, 228n, 229, 241n, 262, 266–7, 272 magazines, xx, 5, 9n, 17, 237, 239–40, 244, 247 passim mainland critics, xxii, 18, 65 Mann, Susan, xvi, 45n, 131n, 149n, 170n, 173n, 195n marriage, 30–3, 36, 41, 42, 107, 116–7, 135, 147–9, 162, 166, 169–70, 196–7 May Fourth, xxii, 3–4, 11–14, 52, 86, 94, 191, 225, 236, 244; and New Culture Movement, 12 McGann, Jerome, xiiin, xvii, xixn, 103n, 154n, 255, 263n McMahon, Keith, xvii, 40n, 41n, 42, 43n, 76n, 129n, 131n, 145n, 147n, 165, 166n, 167n, 226n Ming: short stories, 27, 29–30; idealism, 139 mirrors, 51, 76, 84–5, 98–100, 104, 136–7, 141, 226, 259 modernity, 11–14, 114; ‘repressed modernities,’ 12–14 mothers, 41, 44, 79, 150, 164–7, 185, 207 Mu Zhen Shan Ren, 84–6, 136–9, 150n, 264 Nan nü, xvi narrator: author-narrator gure, 73–4, 83, 85, 88, 94, 115, 126, 128, 136, 148, 156, 188, 192; story-teller/ story-writer, 35, 73, 86n, 89, 95, 116; absent 90, 95, 96, 103, 106, 111, 124, 191; split frame, 96; rhetorical device, 96; ambiguity of voice, 35, 81, 106, 109, 116, 123, 158, 185; character complicity, 90, 126, 175; intrusive, 89, 95, 189; narrative voice, 47, 81, 108–10, 114, 124, 169, 202; human eyewitness, 111; scribe, 111, 115–6, 118, 123; interrupting, 135; commentating, 121, 193 Nelles, William, 92n, 100n, 101n Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, 130, 144, 245 Niehai hua, 1, 19n, 75n, 92n, 241

290

index

O’Neill, P., 109, 110n opium, 20, 119, 130, 131n, 145, 152, 156–7, 163, 166–7, 172, 179, 188, 221; Wars, 5–7, 262; death by ingestion, 145n, 172; habit, xiii, 119, 164 Ouyang Jian, 6, 7, 8n, 9n patronage, 58 Ping Shang Leng Yan, 40, 42n, 43, 45, 47n Pinhua baojian, 5, 15, 19n, 20, 26n, 43, 51–3, 62, 72, 75–7, 79, 84–5, 89, 92, 98–9, 107–8, 110–1, 113, 123–4,130n, 133, 135, 143n, 144, 148, 151, 167n, 189–90, 191n, 194–5, 201, 216 passim, 246, 248, 253 Plaks, Andrew, 1, 19n, 25n, 37, 49, 88n, 201n, 202 poetry: xxv, 37–9, 42, 45, 94n, 95n, 106, 115,126–9, 133, 135, 142, 147, 150, 177, 179, 199 passim, 210, 212–22, 227, 230, 236, 238, 244–6, 268, 270–1; revolution, 11, 15n; women and 45–7, 51; downgrading, 217, 270; structural function, 212–4, 217; folk songs, 37, 39, 106 prefaces, xix, xxi, xxv, 10, 22–4, 25n, 26n, 34, 66, 72, 77–9, 81–4, 86, 91, 97, 107, 119–21, 129, 136, 152–7, 159, 164, 181, 186, 193, 196, 224, 231, 253, 256 passim, 167, 270–1; authorial, 23, 38, 126; didactic, 126 press: rise of periodical press, xxv, 238–9, 242; newspapers, xv, xvi, 54, 62–4, 74, 117, 119, 197, 237–9, 248–9; magazines, xx, 5, 17, 74, 198, 203, 237, 239–40, 242, 244, 246–8, 251–2, 269–70; instalment ction, 63, 74, 237, 240–3, 246–7 print: reprints, 23–4, 26–7, 231; changes in technology, xvii passim, 9, 14, 57, 59–72, 82, 104, 114, 119–22, 198–9, 210, 212, 231–8, 241–2, 246–256, 270, 272; print culture, 132, 203, 249 prohibitions: on books, xxiv, 61, 64–5; on actions, 159n, 170, 249; bans, 66, 88, 196, 233 Pu Songling, 68, 131n qing, xxv, 28, 32, 34–5, 41, 45, 51–3, 76, 79, 84, 107, 129–30, 136–143, 143–6, 171–2, 201, 213, 259; duo qing 145, 149 Qinglou meng, xxiv, 5, 19n, 20, 26, 33 passim, 50–1, 72, 75, 80, 84–7, 93–5,

98–9, 120, 122, 130 passim, 146–9, 151, 153–4, 171, 177, 191–5, 200, 204–5, 213, 216, 224, 226–30, 253, 262, 264, Qingshi leilüe, 34 Qinyan, 108–10, 143n, 194, 226–8 reading: models of reading, xvi, 192; reading history, reading strategies (excluding readings of character), 18, 20, 26, 67–70, 130–3, 135–6, 148–9, 101 passim, 118–9, 120–3, 203 passim, 242–3, 245, 253–7; reading Huayue hen, 257 passim ‘realist novels,’ xxv, 123, 125, 188–9, 194, 200, 216–8, 225, 227–30, 251, 269 red-light: denitions, 10, 20–1 relationships: broken, 98, 132, 185, 195; subversive, 132; group, 159, 163; bilateral, 133, 164, 170; same-sex, 43, 52n, 133, 186 Ricouer, Paul, 23 Roddy, Stephen, 56n ‘romantic novels,’ xxv, 27, 29, 33, 35, 43, 45, 65–7, 128, 132n, 134, 147, 194, 196, 214, 216, 221, 227–30, 239, 252, 269 Romantic route, 134 Ropp, Paul, xvin, 130n, 131n, 139n, 173n, 174n Rou putuan, 52, 65 Rulin waishi, 1, 24, 25n, 56n, 95, 105n, 112 San yan, 29, 39 scholars: see frustrated scholars serialisation, 198, 236, 240, 242, 246 sexuality, 13, 20, 42, 98, 128, 131n, 143, 144n, 151n, 159n, 162, 196 Shanghai, 6, 12n, 20n, 62, 63n, 88, 119, 156, 162n, 164n, 176, 178n, 179, 186–7, 196, 223, 225, 228–9, 238–9, 248–9, 250n Shen bao, 89n, 238–9, 249 Shi Meng, 6–8, 9n Shirane Haruo, 17n, 26n shrew, shrewish behaviour, 21, 87, 128–30, 177–80, 184, 188, 195 Shuihu houzhuan, 69, 202 Shuihu zhuan, 28, 65, 70–1, 221–2, 224, 265 Shuanglin, 32n, 106, 135, 157, 165n, 170–4, 176, 194, 222

index Sing-song Girls of Shanghai – see Haishang hua liezhuan Su Xiaoxiao, 138 ‘social and human sentiment novels,’ 18, 24–5, 39, 40n, 261, 271 Sommer, Matthew, xv, 131n, 150n, 151n, 161n, 168n, 174n, 197n suicide, xvi, xxv, 131, 139, 145n, 170, 173–6, 225, 252; attempted suicide, 30, 33, 150 supernatural; superstition, xxv, 36, 49–51, 65, 101–2, 134, 223–8, 238, 268 Tanselle, G. Thomas, xvii, 255n, 264 Tao Muning, 19n, 21n, 22, 146n text: material xvii, xxvi, 33, 48, 54, 60, 60n, 88, 105, 122, 136, 236, 238, 257, 266, 270; virtual 88, 103; non-prose text, 204, 257; text swapping, 232; circulation, xix, xxi, xxiv, 23, 63–4, 231–4, 238, 244; textual thickening xviii, 135; monetary value, 59; transmission, xvii, xix, xx, 26, 29, 36, 58, 60, 68–70, 141, 191, 200, 203, 235, 242, 255, 268, 74–5, 94, 97 passim, 117–8, 120–3; hybridity, 71; emendation, xx, 58, 68, 69n, 71, 261, 264–5 Tongcheng group, 10 TriviÏnos, Gilbert, 101 virgin courtesans, 32, 158; qingguan, 179 Wang, David Der-wei, xvii, xxvi, 12–3, 14n, 17n, 19n, 22n, 43n, 2,03n, 223, 226n, 227–30, 76n, 90n Waugh, Patricia, 102n, 190n Wei Chizhu, 37, 80, 98, 117, 204n, 208, 210, 214–5, 219–20, 258, 260–3 Wei Xiuren, 80, 117, 234, 252, 258, 262 Wenxuan group, 10 wenxue, 15–6 Widmer, Ellen, xvii, 22n, 69, 131n, 150n, 202

291

wives: see Confucian Wu dialect, 6, 20, 26n, 119, 244 Wu Gang, 137 Wu Zhen, 156–7, 159, 163, 221 Xia Zengyou, 7 xiaoshuo, 4, 15–6, 18–9, 52, 78; zhanghui xiaoshuo, 52 xing, 143–4 xiaxie, xxvi, 4–5, 19–22, 76, 146, 267, 272 Yan Fu, 7, 13, 17 Yan Jiayan, 6n Yang Shuhui, 33n, 37–8 Yangzhou, 36n, 82, 106, 156, 160, 178n, 228n; Yangzhou yanhua zhuzhici, 106 yanqing, 22 Yeh, Catherine, xiii, xvi, 20n, 133n, 163n, 178n, 225, 228, 238n, 248n, 249–52 Yu Da, 86, 146, 252 Yu jiao li, 40, 42, 45, 46n, 48 Yu, Anthony, 48, 105 Yu, Pauline, 6n, 18n, 265n Yuan You, 98, 154–4, 157, 159, 162n, 165n, 168, 170–4, 194, 222 Yuexiang, 107, 111–2, 156–8, 161n, 164, 206–7, 221–2 Zamperini, Paola, xvi, xvii, 131n, 145n, 150n, 174, 175n Zhang Ailing, see Chang, Eileen, 93n, 119, 120n, 179n, 217, 245, 257 Zhang Binglin, 17 Zhang Chunfan, xxi, 112, 128, 264n Zhao, Henry, 16n, 73, 86n, 94, 96n, 107, 115–6, 214n zhi ji, 29, 45, 144 Zhu Xi, 70, 236 Ziyu, 108–10, 143n, 144, 194, 216, 226–7 Zou Tao, 84, 121, 140n, 142, 200, 264, 266

China Studies ISSN 1570–1344 1. Berg, D. Carnival in China. A Reading of the Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan. 2002. ISBN 90 04 12426 8 2. Hockx, M. Questions of Style. Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911-1937. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12915 4 3. Seiwert, H. Popular Religious Movements and Heterodox Sects in Chinese History. 2003. ISBN 90 04 13146 9 4. Heberer, T. Private Entrepreneurs in China and Vietnam. Social and Political Functioning of Strategic Groups. 2003. ISBN 90 04 12857 3 5. Xiang, B. Transcending Boundaries. Zhejiangcun: the Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14201 0 6. Huang, N. Women, War, Domesticity. Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14242 8 7. Dudbridge, G. Books, Tales and Vernacular Culture. Selected Papers on China. 2005. ISBN 90 04 14770 5 8. Cook, C.A. Death in Ancient China. The Tale of One Man’s Journey. 2006. ISBN-10: 90 04 15312 8, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15312 7 9. Sleeboom-Faulkner, M. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Shaping the Reforms, Academia and China (1977-2003). 2007. ISBN-10: 90 04 15323 3, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15323 3 10. Berg, D. (ed.) Reading China. Fiction, History and the Dynamics of Discourse. Essays in Honour of Professor Glen Dudbridge. 2007. ISBN-10: 90 04 15483 3, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15483 4 11. Hillenbrand, M. Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance. Japanese and Taiwanese Fiction, 1960-1990. 2007. ISBN-10: 90 04 15478 7, ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15478 0 12. Hsiao, L. The Eternal Present of the Past. Illustration, Theater, and Reading in the Wanli Period, 1573-1619. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15643 2 13. Gerritsen, A. Ji’an Literati and the Local in Song-Yuan-Ming China. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15603 6 14. Starr, C.F. Red-light Novels of the late Qing. 2007. ISBN 978 90 04 15629 6