uis Lo

How excess structures: on reading Jin Ping Mei

For Tolstoy, ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. But this was the bourgeois family, different from that of the Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei, an outstanding Ming dynasty novel of the late sixteenth century, published around 1618, though its recent English translator, David Tod Roy says a version had been circulating among intellectuals in 1596. Its family comprises one man, six wives, concubines and servants, and each sexual combination creates a different form of unhappiness, more intense than in Tolstoy. Jin Ping Mei is hardly known in Western contexts, except for its (excessive) erotic detail, which is the topic of our discussion. Often credited as the first Chinese novel written by a single author (its authorship not finally known), it exists in two versions. Any commentary must start, as we will, with basic plot details. It develops out of an older text, Shuihu Zhuan [Outlaws of the Marsh], which appeared in final form around 1550. There, in chapters 24 to 27, the hero, Wu Song, punishes by death the adultery between Golden Lotus – married to his brother, Wu the Elder – and Ximen Qing. This happens in Yanggu, bordering the province of Shandong, Confucius’ birthplace. Golden Lotus (Pan Jinlian) poisons her husband with arsenic from the drug shop of her lover, as she does in Jing Ping Mei. The lover is Ximen Qing, who enters the narrative by being accidentally hit by the pole that Golden Lotus uses to lower the blind over the door to the house. He is: