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P'u
Sung-ling, The Tiger Guest The Analects
of the very rational Confucius
advise us that we must respect supernatural beings, but immediately
adds that
we must keep them at a distance. The myths of Taoism and Buddhism have
not
mitigated that ancient advice; there is no country more superstitious
than
China. The vast realist novels it has produced-The Dream of
the Red Chamber is the one to which I most often
return-abounds in wonders precisely because it is realist, and marvels
are not
considered impossible or even unlikely. Most of the
stories chosen for this book come from the
Liao-chai of P'u Sung-ling, whose pen name was the Last
Immortal or Willow
Springs. They date from the seventeenth century. We have chosen the
English
version, Strange Stories from a Chinese
Studio, by Herbert Allen Giles, published in 1880. Of P'u
Sung-ling, very
little is known, except that he failed his examination for a doctorate
in
letters in 1651. Thanks to that lucky disaster, he dedicated himself
entirely
to literature, and we have the book that would make him famous. In
China, the Liao-chai occupies the place held by The Thousand and One Nights in the West.
Unlike Poe
or Hoffmann, P'u Sung-ling does not marvel at the marvels he presents.
He is
closer to Swift, not only in the fantasy of his fables but in the
laconic and
impersonal, intentionally satirical tone with which he tells them. P'u
Sung-ling's hells remind us of those of Quevedo; they are
administrative and
opaque. His tribunals, lictors, judges, and scribes are no less venal
and
bureaucratic than the terrestrial prototypes in any place in any
century. The
reader should not forget that the Chinese, given their superstitious
nature,
tend to read these stories as if they were real events, for in their
imagination
the higher order is a mirror of the lower order, as the Kabbalists
said. At first,
the text may seem naive; then we realize the obvious humor and satire
and the
powerful imagination which, from ordinary elements-a student preparing
for an
exam, a picnic on a hill, a foolish man getting drunk-manages to
invisibly
weave a world as unstable as water and as changing and marvelous as the
clouds.
A kingdom of dreams, and even more, the corridors and labyrinths of
nightmares.
The dead return to life, a stranger who visits turns into a tiger, the
apparently beautiful girl is merely a piece of skin on a green-faced
demon. A
ladder climbs into the sky, another down a well that is inhabited by
infernal
executioners, magistrates, and masters. To the
stories of P'u Sung-ling we have added two that are as unexpected as
they are
astonishing from the almost infinite novel, The
Dream of the Red Chamber. Of the author or authors, little is known
with
any certainty, for in China fiction and drama are subaltern genres. The Dream of the Chamber or Hung Lou Meng
is the most illustrious
and perhaps the most populated Chinese novel. It has 421 characters-189
women
and 232 men-numbers that surpass the Russian novel or the Icelandic
saga, and which,
at first sight, could overwhelm a reader. A complete translation, which
is yet
to be done, would require three thousand pages and a million words.
Dating from
the eighteenth century, its most probable author was Tsao Hsueh-chin.
"The
Dream of Pao-yu" prefigures that chapter in Lewis Carroll where Alice
dreams of the Red King who is dreaming her, except that Carroll's dream
is a
metaphysical fantasy, and Pao-yu's is charged with sadness, despair,
and a deep
irreality. "The Wind-Moon Mirror," whose title is an erotic metaphor,
is perhaps the one moment in literature that, with melancholy and a
certain
dignity, deals with solitary pleasure. There is
nothing more characteristic of a country than its imaginations. In its few
pages, this book offers a glimpse of one of the oldest cultures on the
planet
and, at the same time, one of the most unusual approaches to fantastic
literature. [1985]
[EW]
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