Chinese Literature Podcast VI

 Plum Blossom in the Golden Vase:

 

Sick of the Chinese Literature Podcast’s shit. ‘Hi, I’m an American boy academic! I can’t talk about Plum Blossom in the Golden Vase without making a jillion excuses for the porn, like I’m teaching junior high; I absolutely cannot entertain for the sake of argument any discussion of how the porn operates as porn. US Puritanism has fucked my brain harder than this protagonist fucks, and he dies of yang poisoning/exploding dick’.

 

Why are they the only game in town? Why is the only game like, Monopoly? Do we get this level of teehee clown shoes with like, Fanny Hill, or is it reserved for PoC lit? It’s weird that they frantically DIY distance themselves, as though Ming Dynasty porn really stands to implicate them. It’s their own podcast aimed at a para-aca audience: who is asking them to tediously and actively unhelpfully self-censor? No kids are listening to this shit, who cares?

 

This lens also elides quite interesting questions about the novel’s strategies. If you do believe this is ultimately a Buddhist text about the meaninglessness of the endless acquisition and consumption depicted herein, does that frame serve to legitimise the porn for its audience? Is the philosophy a fig leaf? Is the porn well-written to draw audiences in, for commercial reasons, or to better hook them via the workings of the attention economy, and draw them along to work’s eventual self-repudiation? Is Jin Ping Mei supposed to offer up a healthy relationship with sexuality that sours when the lead goes over the top? Or is it more like the Victorian My Secret Life et al, where the tedium is just a product of the masturbatory material itself’s being repetitious?

 

Perhaps it’s like how, in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky sticks on a whole coda—almost a written out trauma reaction—that’s really moralist. Yet beforehand, the novel has a whole internal logic that bucks the coda’s attempts to contain and smother its chaotic vivacity. This occurs because Dostoevsky deeply really internally divided (due to having been deliberately traumatised by the tsarist state, which sentenced him to execution, hauled him before the firing squad and then let him go on the promise he’d be a good boy from here on out). The Real Slim Shady is the bulk of the book, which even Dostoevsky’s ambivalence can’t wrest into seemliness. (Nabakov has some dumbass commentary on this, in that he believes the coda invalidates the rest of the book by cheapening out on it. Which is curious given that he’s asking us to listen to him even though he’s a White Russian. I just would not be so quick to say a kind of weaselly self-pitying political streak wipes out the rest of someone’s work, if I were Nabokov.)

 

Where is the original audience reception in this sex-phobic, highly localising legitimising push? I think this analysis could truly benefit from some cross cultural comparisons, because a lot of even Victorian English porn has no idea whatever what you do when you get to Jerusalem. The stakes just melt away in a fugue of more x-treme taboo sex acts. The books stop being detailed, emotionally connotative or load-bearing for any kind of investment: the whole energy just peters out after the Bad Education of whoever. There’s a craft-level sense in which writers really seem to struggle with narrative structure in early pornographic novels in various traditions: I wonder whether Volume Five or whatever of Plum Blossom in a Golden Vase is just staring down exactly what all of the ‘Aubrey Beardsley doing the John Travolta Pulp Fiction idunno gif’ endings are also stuck on.

 

Tao Yuanming’s Peach Blossom Spring

 

Lads, Tao Yuanming’s “Peach Blossom Spring”, with its cave entrance and utopia and even the golden hair of the people therein, follows the pattern of a medieval Romance otherworld encounter in a way comp lit has not engaged with (to my knowledge). It is, WOW, just right there. 

 

These podcast boys did my nut in talking about how the lack of geographic specificity is a product of this specific language. It’s about narrative technologies and strategies, you can find just crystalline analogues in extra-Asian contemporary literary traditions. Buddy, I have some faerie realms to show your ass. I have Byrne’s theory of incomprehensibility as a means of evocation to reveal to you: into my arms.

 

Confucius

 

For me the most valuable part of this treatment was the central discussion of the operation of constructs of authority in Chinese literature, expressed via the maxim 'I transmit, I don't create. I trust and value the ancients’.

 

Shen Xiu’s Little Bird Causes Seven Deaths

 

A huaben (vernacular Ming or Qing short story) about the occluded but inevitable operation of cosmic justice. 

 

Journey to the West

 

A picaresque. One of the four great novels of the Ming.

 

Journey Even MORE to the West: The Xi You Bu

 

A just-post Qing spin-off of Journey to the West involving dreams, featuring the titular Xi You Bu, the tower of myriad mirrors. About tons of parallel universes—like the Narnia forest of pools.