Conclusion

CHINOPERLPAPERSNo.17 The last part of the novel contains two sequences which constitute rejections of popular drama. Tan Shaowen marries a woman, Wu-shi, who is described as having spent a lot of time watching plays in local temples.277 She calls for the performance of specific plays in order to make jokes about others watching the plays (79.770). She makes analogies to plays and their titles when she argues with Tan Shaowen (82.788). But she is finally won over by an illustrated volume of stories of filial conduct, which she praises as even better than watching plays (91.854). This, obviously, is the kind of mass media the author was interested in. In the other sequence, actors have been provided at a banquet for a visiting education official. A disreputable local official suggests that scenes from the Xixiang ji be performed. The visiting official roundly rejects the idea,278 and no plays are performed at all. The narrator tells us that the local official was later indicted for improper conduct with actors (95.888-89). Conclusion Compared with the fiction that came before it, the lin Ping Mei cihua represents a quantum leap in the artistic incorporation of both quotations from and allusions to content and the borrowing of formal conventions of oral performing literature. Oral performing literature is used in the novel in an experimental rather than a uniform and consistent way, as was the case in stories making use of the conventions of oral performing literature from start to finish in a regular fashion. The many uses of oral performing literature in the lin Ping Mei cihua (realistic as well as nonrealistic), make it a richer work at the same time as they give it 277 The narrator earlier quoted a poem that condemns the idea of women watching plays (48.449-50). Number 28 in a list of household rules (Jiaxun chunyan ~rWrr1¥§), drawn up by Li Liiyuan and appended to manuscript copies of the novel, forbids family members to go to temple markets because there are always ne'er-do-wells hanging around the stage there. See Luan Xing ~£, ed., Qilu deng yanjiu ziliao ~~m1Vf~~R (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou shuhua she, 1982), pp. 144-45. 278 Besides qualms about the sexual content of the play, he also condemns it as slanderous toward the Cui and Zheng families. 96 Rolston lin Ping Mei cihua a kind of disorderly appearance. It seems certain that the author was using many of them as distancing devices to prevent over-identification between reader and fictional characters. However, a more synthetic and mimetic conception of fiction took over and the novel was transformed into the "Chongzhen" version; the examples of the use of formal conventions from oral performing literature in particular were removed. On the other hand, the existence of some of the nonrealistic uses of oral performing literature in works of fiction not clearly influenced by the lin Ping Mei suggests that playing around with these matters was naturally attractive to writers of fiction in traditional China. But it must be admitted that none of them, with the possible exception of Zhangtai Liu, are as radical in this aspect as the lin Ping Mei cihua. There were works influenced directly by the cihua version of the novel before it dropped out of general circulation, but they do not have the experimental attitude of the earlier work; even though Ding Yaokang's Xu lin Ping Mei makes fairly heavy use of oral performing literature, his attitude toward the material used differed radically from that of the author of the lin Ping Mei cihua. Authors influenced by the "Chongzhen" version of the novel and Zhang Zhupo's commentary to it, such as Cao Xueqin, seem to have been most impressed by the idea of oral performing literature as a code through which messages could be conveyed from author to reader and from character to character. With the rise of a commentary tradition for vernacular fiction at the end of the 16th century, the conception of the author of fiction as a literatus unwilling to tip his hand directly (and thus the need for commentary) became more and more important. This in...