The Model in the Sequels to the Jin Ping Mei: Xu Jin Ping Mei

CHINOPERLPAPERSNo.17 of the characters.114 To sum up, nonrealistic uses of oral performing literature in the lin Ping Mei can be divided into two main categories, depending on whether it is the content (and meaning) of the description or quotation that is focused on, or a matter of the borrowing of formal conventions. The content (and associated meaning) of the descriptions and quotations is used as a symbolic language by the author and the characters to convey new information about what characters are thinking, to foreshadow future events, to make comments on characters and general situationsby analogous or antithetical contrast, and to draw ironic attention toward the thematic and plot conventions of popular literature. The most striking of the formal conventions borrowed from oral performing literature are the use of song for dialogue and soliloquy and the manner of handling the entrances of comical secondary characters. There is also, however, one instance of borrowing techniques for handling dialogue from oral performed narrative and many orthographicconventionsfrom written versions of oral performing literature. These conventions are used intermittently, with little regard for consistency or the assimilation of the material into the predominant style of the narrative. There is also one instance in which Chen Jingji, after dreaming of the past, sings the story of his life (93/2a-4b), which represents a partial recapitulation of the plot of the novel. In this paper we will examine the subsequent history of the use of these innovations in Chinese fiction in general. In what follows here, we will, however, tum first to the sequels to the novel based on the cihua version of it, then to the so-called "Chongzhen *1J[" (1628-1644) version and its commentators, including Zhang Zhupo ~t1~ (1670-1698), and finally to a little-known later sequel to the Jin Ping Mei based on the Chongzhen version. The Model in the Sequels to the lin Ping Mei: Xu lin Ping Mei Xu Jin Ping Mei #jt~JfIim, the first sequel to the lin Ping Mei 114 See Carlitz,Rhetoric of Chin p'ing mei, pp. 54-55, and Plaks, Four Masterworks, p. 127 n 214. Rolston lin Ping Mei cihua now extant/15 was written by Ding Yaokang T*I1C (1599-1671). He worked himself into the text of the novel116and his authorship of it got him into trouble with the Qing government, ostensibly because of the sexual content of the novel. In reality it was the unflattering image in it of their ancestors the Jurched (founders of the Jin dynasty (1115-1211) and rulers of North China until they in tum were conquered by the Mongols) and references to the Ming dynasty that deny the legitimacy of the Qing (14.131) that brought him down. In any case, he spent over a hundred days in prison in 1665 over the matter.117His novel continues the general chronology and characters of the original, following the stories of the reincarnations of those characters already dead before his novel begins. Because his focus is less on the rise and fall of a single household than on the retribution and salvation of the individual characters through sometimes multiple incarnations, his novel tends to break down into individual narrative strains only loosely connected to each other. Xu lin Ping Mei, in spite of the trouble it got him into, is also far more straightforwardly didactic than is the case with lin Ping Mei cihua. Because of the text of the fourth item of thefanli J'L1jU (statement of editorial principles) of the novel,118we know 115 There are reports by Shen Defu and Yuan Hongdao :R*m (1568-1610) of a sequel by the same author as the original, entitled Yu Jiao Li '±~$. It is not now extant and it is impossible to tell from the descriptions whether it also contained nonrealistic uses of oral performing literature. Like Xu Jin Ping Mei, the main characters in the sequel were supposed to have been reincarnations of characters in the original. For background on Yu Jiao Li, see Patrick Hanan, "The Text of the Chin p'ing mei," Asia Major, n.s., 9 (1962): 1-57, pp. 51-53. 116 Xu Jin Ping Mei, in...