Textual Practice

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How excess structures: on reading Jin Ping Mei

Louis Lo & Jeremy Tambling
To cite this article: Louis Lo & Jeremy Tambling (2009) How excess structures: on reading Jin
Ping Mei , Textual Practice, 23:1, 119-140, DOI: 10.1080/09502360802622334
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502360802622334

Published online: 19 Feb 2009.

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Date: 17 November 2016, At: 15:18

Textual Practice 23(1), 2009, 119 140

Louis Lo and Jeremy Tambling

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 1596.1 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.2 Any commentary must start, as
we will, with basic plot details.3 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.4 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:
originally from one of the wealthier Yanggu families [who] had come
down in the world and opened a drug and medicine shop in front of
the county office. He was smooth and cunning, and skilled with fists
and stave. Recently, he had grown quite rich again, acting as a
go-between in litigation, making deals, passing money, corrupting
officials. The whole county treated him with careful deference.
(Shuihu Zhuan 1.3767)

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2009 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09502360802622334

Textual Practice

Being a go-between is universally practised in Jin Ping Mei, both in

business and sex: Pan Jinlian and Ximen Qing are brought together by
an old woman, Mother Wang who acts as pandaress. But in Jin Ping
Mei, the adultery is not so quickly dealt with as it is in Shuihu Zhuan, a
secular warrior narrative with 108 heroes. The parent text is distorted.
The bamboo blind incident occurs in chapter 2, the lovers commit adultery
in chapter 4, Wu is killed in chapter 5, Wu Song is foiled in his attempts at
revenge in chapters 9 and 10, and does not kill Pan Jinlian until chapter 87;
instead he has to be banished to Mengzhou in Henan province. Nor, does
he kill Ximen Qing, who is destroyed partly through his own sexual drive,
partly through the instrumentality of Pan Jinlian, who forces him on to
further sexual exploits. The narrative space of Jin Ping Mei is created out
of distorting the events of Shuihu Zhuan, as if the masculinist ethos of
that work has been replaced by something more feminine, deceptive, transgressive. The novel overreaches masculinity, and creates another space
that of chapters 11 to 87 which challenges the limited placing given
to women in Shuihu Zhuan. It dislocates the earlier text, intrudes its existence into it (its title, as we shall see, names three non-virtuous women) and
exists in its own provocative, almost wholly secular right.5

Powers of the fox fairy

Ximen Qing in Jin Ping Mei is:

the decadent scion of a family of considerable wealth from whom he
had inherited a wholesale pharmaceutical business located on the
street that ran in front of the district yamen [i.e. police-station].
He had been a dissolute young scamp since his youth and had
acquired some skill in such martial arts as boxing and fencing,
with the quarterstaff. He also liked to gamble, and there was little
he didnt know about backgammon, elephant chess, and the
various word-games played by breaking words down into their component parts. Now that he had come into his inheritance and had
money to spend . . . he played the role of influence peddler, intervening in public business on peoples behalf, for a fee. (R.1.2.53)
This A version suggests that the family is decaying, and the text simply specifies that he got money rather than, necessarily, coming into an inheritance. While he is corrupt, he also practises language-games, as if his
occupation is corrupting words, taking their constituent Chinese characters
apart and creating punning words from them. In chapter 25, he is a
business-man, employing for his household a purchasing agent, Laiwang,

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from Xuzhou in Jiangsu province, (R.2.25.85). He sends him off first to

the Eastern Capital, which Roy (R. 1.475) identifies with Kaifeng (Henang
province), to give presents to the Grand Preceptor Cai Jung (lived 1046
1126). The latter was one of four actual officials surrounding the Song
Emperor. Laiwang must continue to Hangzhou for business (R.2.25.97).
There is a history to both Cai Jung, and Laiwang. The first exemplifies
the face of public corruption, being denounced in an official letter as
having an artful, specious, cunning and dangerous nature (R.1.17.344).
Laiwang personifies private corruption. Bribery, which chapter 25
describes, begins an even more successful career for Ximen Qing. When
he meets Pan Jinlian, he is a widower, with one daughter (Ximen Dajie),
and has started a new patriarchy, with marriage to the wealthy Wu
Yueniang, a new First Lady.
Pan Jinlian in Jin Ping Mei becomes Ximen Qings fifth wife after she
has been widowed by murdering Wu the Elder. There are six wives for
Ximen Qing, apart from the dead wife. They are named in chapter 9 as:
Wu Yueniang, the Moon Lady; Li Jiaoer, who was a singing girl
(Picture of Grace in Egerton); Meng Yulou, Tower of Jade; Sun Xue,
Snow Moth (Beauty of the Snow, Egerton); Pan Jinlian, the Golden
Lotus; and Li Pinger, the Vase Lady. The servant of Pan Jinlian is
Pang Chunmei, Spring Plum Blossom. The last three women, all dead
by the end, give their names to the novel, which is thus: The Plum
[Mei] in the Golden [Jin] Vase [Ping], or Plum [Mei] Blossoms of the
Golden [Jin] Vase [Ping], names suggestive of extravagance and perhaps
of artificiality, and death. The novel starts with Jin (Pan Jinlian), while
Mei (Pang Chunmei) closes it since she dies in the last chapter. She, as
servant, not wife, gets the first emphasis in the way the title must be
read (as the Plum in the golden vase) and the last one (because the noun
Mei comes at the end of the title, and because her death comes last).
These wives along with concubines and servants, are collected in the
first twenty of the hundred chapters. Ximen Qing dies in chapter 79, so
that, in symmetry with these twenty chapters of introduction and accumulation, chapters 80100 show the collapse of the house, half feudal, half
bourgeois. Chapter 12 shows him infatuated with Li Guijie, (Cassia in
Egerton), a singing girl, with whom he stays in a brothel for two weeks,
not coming home. She remains important. Her mastery over Ximen
Qing and Pan Jinlian is shown when she gets Ximen Qing to cut off a
lock of Pan Jinlians hair, which she puts into the linings of her shoes, as
if trampling her underfoot every day (R.1.12.247). What is on top (hair)
goes underneath; possession of some object of a rival means dominating
the rival, and objects seem to be possessed of life, so mattering to characters
in the text, male and female alike. The beginning of the affair with Li
Guijie is followed in chapter 13 by Ximen Qing beginning with Li Pinger.

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At that stage she is married to Hua Zixu, originally one of the members of a
male club of ten of which Ximen Qing is the senior member (R.1.10.200).
Zizus name means something like fictitious and non-existent, and perhaps
makes fun of his sexuality, a point possibly clarified by him being a nephew of
Eunuch Director Hua, member of the Imperial Bodyguard. The husband dies
in chapter 14, having lost both a lawsuit, and his wife, who virtually kills him.
Hua means flower (implying femininity) and spend: the man has spent
himself. A poem is cited, concluding:
The scion of the Ximen family was given over to lust and dissipation;
His adulterous and fickle paramour [Li Pinger] was nothing but a
captivating wench.
Hua Zixu became so engorged with rage his tender guts gave way;
But another day, in the court of the underworld, he would be
revenged. (R.1.14.285)
This episode, which evokes the thought of revenge, parallels the adultery of
Ximen Qing with Pan Jinlian, also, because of Wu Sung, instinct with the
thought of vengeance. It aligns this sixth wife with the fifth. The result of
the removal of the husband, Hua Zixu, is that Ximen Qings wealth now
shows in the construction of a garden, which starts to come into view in
chapter 14, using both his and Li Pinger and Hua Zixus land: they had
lived next-door (R.1.14.2956).6
Chapters 22 to 26 show Ximen Qings seduction of Song Huilian,
whose given name lian means lotus and applies to the bound feet
was originally identical to Pan Jinlians (R.2.22.31):
Pan Jinlian was the daughter of Tailor Pan whose shop was located
outside the South Gate. She was the sixth sibling in her generation of
the family. Because she had always been good-looking and possessed
a pair of very small bound feet she was called Jinlian, or Golden
Lotus. (R.1.1.26)
The phrase san chuen jin lian [three-inched golden lotus], describes standard bound feet. Now the women are rivals. Song Huilian is married to
Laiwang, who, as we have seen, is Ximen Qings business manager. In
chapter 26, Wu Yueniang feels that Chaos is king. The nine-tailed foxfairy has appeared in the world. She adds that Ximen Qing has swallowed
a soul-disorienting drug (R.2.26.106).7 Roys footnote for the nine-tailed
fox fairy, refers to the one who sucked out the soul and usurped the body of
Ta-chi, concubine of the King of Chou (10861045 BCE). Wu Yueniang
is attempting to blame a particular person (perhaps Pan Jinlian but who,

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she is not sure), for disrupting the household. Saying that it is a nine-tailed
fox fairy means she implicitly blames her husband for being influenced by
some woman. And by the end of chapter 26, Ximen Qing has had Laiwan
exiled to Xuzhou while his wife has attempted to hang herself with a towel
and been revived with ginger extract (R.2.26.116). After a row which
leads to blows with Sun Xue who has committed adultery with
Laiwang and a reprimand by Wu Yeuniang, she hangs herself properly,
with her footbindings (R.2.26.123). Li Pinger attempts suicide in the same
way in chapter 19 (R.1.19.395).
In chapter 28, it is evident that Ximen Qing keeps one of Song
Hulians shoes as a memento (R.2.28.155). Indeed, the shoes were significant erotic objects for Song Hulian, since in chapter 24, during the Lantern
Festival,
one moment she was dropping some item of her costume jewellery
and then picking it up again. The next moment she was losing her
shoe and then leaning against a certain party while she fiddled
with it. (R.2.24.6970)
Actually Song Hulian is wearing the fifth wifes shoes over her own so that
these will not get muddy, which means that her feet are smaller than Pan
Jinlians: her rivalry, beginning with names, extends to feet and shoes. The
certain party mentioned is Chen Jinji, Ximen Qings son-in-law, and she
is being sexually provocative with him. Now the embroidered shoes,
exchange-objects, symbols of Song Hulians triumph, but still, using
Marxs language, lifeless commodities, are, like the footbindings with
which they are associated, empty shells, markers of death.
At the end of chapter 28, Ximen Qing tells Pan Jinlian that he wants
to see her in red shoes: it excites him sexually just seeing them. This
reminds Pan Jinlian, who has also lost her shoes in chapter 27 (as a
result of taking them off for sex in the garden) of what Ximen Qing has
done. She summarises his actions:
You took this shoe off the stinking hoof of Laiwangs dead wife,
treasured it like the pearl on a piece of jewellery, and secreted it in
your snow cave in the Hidden Spring Grotto, under the artificial
hill in the garden . . . as though it was some exotic rarity.
(R.2.28.164)
She then asks for a knife to cut up the rival womans shoe and throw it into
a privy. (She says: fetch me a knife so I can chop that whore into pieces and
throw them into the privy [R.2.28.164].) The gesture with the shoes is the
equivalent of trampling the hair underfoot, showing how they, as both

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a commodity (an exotic rarity) and a fetish, act as a metonymy for Song
Hulian. Pan Jinlian ends up cutting up Ximen Qings fetish. The episode,
whose vocabulary, in the passage quoted, shows a fascination with dirt, parallels another in chapter 58: Pan Jinlians hatred of having her own shoes
dirtied, at a moment when she is full of jealousy against Li Pinger (for
having a baby) and Pang Chunmei (because Ximen Qing is visiting her).
At such a moment, the fantasised value of the shoes is apparent, as if the
clean shoes, now dirtied, were a figure for herself, as real as herself
(E.3.58.6264). The passages link Kristeva on the abject, that which
repels and attracts, with the commodity which is also the fetish, as if
suggesting that the commodity fetish in its hollowness, attracts feelings
of abjection.8
Chapter 29, giving the aftermath of the shoes affair, is ambivalent,
suggesting the idea of delirium within the family, and its prosperity, and
propensity towards death. After the shoe-incident, which caused chaos in
chapter 28, Meng Yulou, the third wife, talks to Pang Jinlian. She says
Wu Yueniang said:
Chaos is king.
The nine-tailed fox fairy has appeared in the world,
and has got that benighted ruler so befuddled hell be
Banishing his son and divorcing his wife,
before you know it. Just remember what she [the fox fairy] did to
that servant, Laiwang [. . .] she managed to frame him so effectively
he was driven out the household, whereupon she turned his attention
to his wife and made her life so unbearable she committed suicide.
And now, all account of a single shoe, shes stirred up enough of a
rumpus to:
Startle Heaven and shake the earth.
If it was your shoe, why didnt you keep it on your foot where it
belonged? (R.2.29.169)
The fox fairy, as before, metaphorises a corrupting woman, who makes a
man (the benighted ruler, the King of Chou, or any other patriarch)
lose his rationality. The term fox fairy appears in modern Chinese with
this signification. But we can go beyond Wu Yueniangs common-sense
explanation for events, and see the fox fairy as an indescribable otherness
bringing delirium into all circumstances. It drives Ximen Qing, as the
benighted ruler, into injustice, causes Laiwans exile, produces suicide,
and, most important for what is regarded as important in this text, disturbs
the erotic attachment to objects. This latter is the fox fairys most significant act, it seems, from Meng Yulous summary. Such an otherness,
personified as female, and perhaps sometimes identifiable with one or

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other of the wives, cannot be located in any one person or event. It is a force
of delirium that everything in this text must face: beginning with the wind
that makes the pole hit Ximen Qing (chapter 2).9
Chapter 29 reaches a climactic moment in the familys prosperity. An
episode occurs which is adapted and developed in chapter 5 of Honglou
Meng (The Story of the Stone) (1792), the Chinese novel owing much to
Jin Ping Mei. That chapter 5 opens up predictions about at least twelve
women, many tragically marked for death.10 In Jin Ping Mei, chapter
29, the Daoist monk, Immortal Wu, examines the physiognomy and horoscope of Ximen Qing, tells him he will be lucky and distinguished, and
have a son (as happens in chapter 30), but will die before he is thirtysix. Ximen Qing asks him to physiognomize his wives. Predictions
follow, first for Wu Yueniang, who lives on to the end, dying aged 67,
but effectively losing her son by giving him to a Daoist monk. Another
comes for Li Jiaoer, who pilfers Ximen Qings property when he is dead,
and marries his rival, Zhang Erguan (chapter 80). Another follows for
Meng Youlou, who, as one of the best of the wives, successfully remarries in chapters 91 and 92. The fourth is Pan Jinlian (the Jin of the
title). She seems uneasy, unwilling to be analysed, and she gives the
monk pause for thought. Her death aged 27 is foretold. She is followed
by Li Pinger (the titles Ping), and then by Sun Xue, who in chapter 90
elopes with Laiwang, who has returned from Xuzhou as a polisher of
mirrors. Through Pang Chunmeis agencies, she is sold to a brothel in
chapter 94, becomes a singing-girl in Linqing in Shandong province,
and, at 27, hangs herself (chapter 99). This is after Zhang Sheng, whose
mistress she is, has killed Chen Jingji and been executed, again through
Pang Chunmeis agencies.
Wu Yueniang wants two other women to be looked at. The first is
Ximen Dajie, Ximen Qings daughter by his first marriage. She marries
Chen Jingji, and commits suicide at 24, hanging herself over the bed
(chapter 92). Her husband Chen Jingji, seen first in chapter 18, is a
virtual replica of Ximen Qing, down to the word-games which he practises.
The description of him in that chapter (R.1.18.3678) replays that of
Ximen Qing in chapter 2, and is the more significant as he then first
sees Pan Jinlian, and angles towards an incestuous affair with her. (The
fathers adultery, and the son-in-laws incest, with the same woman, is
an example of the repetition-with-difference of which this text is so full.)
Incest occurs in chapter 80, and after several homosexual encounters, to
be described in their place, and a final affair with Pang Chunmei, Zhang
Sheng kills him.
The last prediction is for Pang Chunmei (Mei in the title) whose
importance develops through the texts second half. Mistress of Ximen
Qing, she is thrown out of the house in chapter 85, marries Commander

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Zhou, and becomes prosperous, but turns to sexual affairs, with Chen
Jingji and with servants, dying in chapter 100. These hints of the future
which Immortal Wu gives are there as warnings to be heeded or not:
Ximen Qing apparently disregards them (I had him physigonomize us
so as not to be discourteous, thats all, he says afterwards [R.2.29.185]).
They mark the moment when fortunes must either decline or go further,
and where people must mark previous and present actions and note
their consequences.
From chapters 30 to 48, things in the household continue well,
while in chapter 49, a further monk is seen, whose character and
appearance which the commentaries suggest is like a penis will
be discussed below. He gives Ximen Qing an aphrodisiac, with the instruction Be judicious in your use of these remedies, and give none to
anyone else (E.2.49.309); the instruction to only use so much being a
caution against excess, and an implicit invitation to transgression.
Before he went away, he cautioned Ximen Qing, telling him not to take
more than the proper dose: warnings that Ximen Qing should discipline
himself.
This is not the first time Ximen Qing has used a supplementary
aphrodisiac: one appeared in chapter 27 with the four-character name
translated as Amorous Cries of Boudoir Beauties (R.2.27.146). The
need, or desire, for aids towards sexual performance appears in chapter
38, where he carries round a brocaded bag in his sleeve, full of sexual
implements (R.2.38.3878). The Indian Monk confirms something
already present: a need to supplement sex by sexual additives. The
immediate result in chapter 50 is that, newly enflamed, he tries to
force himself on Li Pinger in the midst of her menstrual cycle, accepting
no postponement: I dont know why, Ximen said, but I feel I want
you today. I am afraid I must insist (E.2.50.322). The aphrodisiac
entails a new sense of disorganising desire at work, a compulsion driving
both the characters and the text. The effect of such forcing is disastrous
for the health of Li Pinger, and her baby. In chapter 59, Li Pingers
baby, Guange, dies, despite having ginger broth poured down his throat
(E.3.59.80). He has been virtually frightened to death by Pan Jinlians
cat, so that he is almost murdered through the womans agency. His
mother, Li Pinger, dies (chapter 62); Ximen Qing, who shows signs of
weakening in these later chapters, follows when his penis bursts while he
is being made love to by Pan Jinlian (chapter 79). This is 30 chapters
after the appearance of the Indian monk whose gift of the aphrodisiac
so brought out the compulsive and repetitive desire which Freud, in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, identified with the death-drive. Dispersal
of everything at that orgasmic moment is followed by dispersal of his
goods and family.

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We have discussed the narrative and its consistency of structure, and

realism which supports so many interrelated characters, but one detail
should not be overlooked. More than B, the A version of the text, and
especially as emphasised in Roys translation, is full of quotations, citations,
poems, songs and allusions. Most of Roys annotations attempt to identify
sources for these.11 The translation, printing these citations in separate
lines, makes the text poetic, as if deriving from other literary texts. That
each realistic episode can be supplemented by poetry brings out the
texts excess. The citational quality works against its realism, identifiable
in, for example, the accumulation of detail about the house and garden,
and Ximen Qings business methods. Even the prolific sexual activities,
realistically enough described, are named, and so textualised, as wellknown games. In chapter 27, Ximen Qing and Pan Jinlian played the variations called Crossing the Bridge, Inserting the Arrow Upside Down,
A Pair of Wild Geese in Flight, Passing the Examinations and Qualifying for Office, The Two Chiao Sisters read a Book, Yang Kuei-fei
Takes a Spring Nap, The Black Dragon Penetrates the Cave, and
Rolling the Pearl Curtain Bottom Side Up (R.2.27.143). Naming
invites speculation on the readers part, to decode the language into
what happened, so that while the textualising codifies sexual activities
into variant forms, it is transgressive, leading the reader to complete in
imagination the play happening at the level of the signified (the sexual
games) and the signifier (the play of language).
The textual richness particularly associates itself with Pan Jinlian, the
ex-singing-girl. When Ximen Qing is away, she tells his servant, Daian, to
listen to her plaint a self-dramatising term and when she has finished
singing, she started to cry all over again (R.1.8.153). Singing seems
expressive of strong emotion, as if, like sexuality, it was how people
broke out of constraints, towards transgressiveness.12 Wu Yueniang, the
Moon Lady, says of Pan Jinlian there are no songs she doesnt know
[. . .] Give her the first line and she can always tell you the last. Whenever
my husband calls for a song, there is always trouble. She knows what is in
his mind. She often makes him angry (E.3.73.336). Textual citations may
be feminine destabilising forces, surfacing within the narrative and the dialogue. They are forms of a feminine unconscious which knows more than
the individual character can what is in their mind. The text shows a tendency towards knowing more than can be said, of possessing energies
that defeat conscious thought. But poems cited which testify to the experiences in the novel, have no authority, no commanding voice; as with the
poem cited in chapter 14 about the death of Hua Zixu (quoted earlier).
The poems testify as it is said in the text, by not having the power of
testimony, i.e. by not giving a final authority. They provide another
voice, which rather than closing down the text, opens it up.

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Evidently, from this schematic outline, the actions are driven by

secular business motives. They are also impelled by sexual desire, which
at times seems understandable, but can also be uncanny; for this the
image of the fox fairy may help. The novel is full of sexual encounters
described in detail, the most commented on being sexual intercourse
with Pan Jinlian in chapter 27. They intensify in excess after chapter 50.
No account of Jin Ping Mei can ignore the eroticism in the text or in
the actions which are the texts subject, nor ignore its relation to the
force of desire which impels the writing, making it break free from any
mythic or legendary origin, such as characterises other Ming novels
(Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Journey to the West). It stands alone
and claims independence, as well as parodying Shuihu Zhuan. That
makes it transgressive: the literary modernity of this freedom from the
mythic is not in Honglou Meng. The force of repeated desire that the
text registers gives it its structure of inevitability, the sense that characters
are caught within a structure which makes them act in character until
death. (In chapter 100, they are each destined to be reborn in a Buddhist
cycle of beginning again.)

Powers of transgression and taboo

If sexuality and the erotic are destabilising, they give the novel its pattern.
They threaten its structure, making the family existence disastrous, but
they are its structure, because while sexuality is the novels dominant
force, Jin Ping Mei has a schematic structure. Sexuality de-structures
while eroticism, its excess, structures. This point applies to narrative.
Excess takes different forms, some indescribable (sexual games must be textualised). In Bataille, eroticism . . . is assenting to life up to the point of
death.13 It differs from Foucaults sexuality, since this, in the modern
subject, is measured, constructed as knowable, codifiable. Eroticism
begins with what overflows the measure, being a giving up to the point
of loss of identity. It breaks down the discontinuous single subject,
whose disconnectedness makes him a defined and separate individual.
Only the death of such brings about the state which Bataille calls continuous, the blending and fusion of separate objects (Eroticism 25). Yet
the continuous is only momentarily achieved, and cannot be an absolute,
for the experience of the continuum is also the experience of absolute
difference.14 Eroticism is inherently transgressive, stepping over the
limits of discontinuity (those in which forms of sexuality can exist). But
a transgression is not the same as a back-to-nature movement; it suspends
a taboo without suppressing it (Eroticism 36). Taboos and limits are not
thereby taken out of the way. This point may be seen in Jin Ping Mei

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with the careful observance of festivals and birthdays, and in the sense of a
formality which, coexisting with the sexual goings-on, generates them.
But the limit itself is also transgressive in character:
the taboos on which the world of reason is founded are not rational
for all that . . . a calm opposite to violence would not suffice to draw a
clear line between the two worlds. If the opposition did not draw
upon violence in some way, if some violent negative reaction did
not make violence horrible for everyone, reason alone could not
define those shifting limits authoritatively enough . . . a taboo
makes a world of calm reason possible but is basically a shudder
appealing not to reason but to feeling, just as violence is. (Eroticism
63 64)
The imposition of a taboo is transgressive, just as transgression leads to the
imposition of taboos. So Walter Benjamin argues that there is inherent in
all such violence [violence used for natural ends] a law-making character.15 Taboo (which maintains the discontinuous state) and transgression
(which produces the continuous) are not so distinct. With this in mind, we
can consider what the Indian monk tells Ximen Qing, giving him the drug,
but telling him not to use it to excess. Imposing the limit is transgressive, an
act of violence which suits the heterogeneity of this roaming monk from
the West. To understand the implications of this medicine, which
invites transgression and the taboo on that transgression simultaneously,
necessitates drawing on the Phaedrus (370 BCE). Derrida discusses the
pharmakon in that text, sometimes translated as a receipt for medicine
bought at a pharmacy, but ambiguous, both poison and medicine at
once. This pharmakon has, because of its double nature, a double effect,
being the undecidable supplement to nature. It is not possible to think
of the monks advice to be moderate as being other than transgressive.
This is not just because when he gives the medicine he has already
gobbled up everything so that his eyes almost stand out of his head
(E.2.49.308). Nor because telling someone not to do something revives
desire, but because the restraining advice is not separable from the aphrodisiac; the advice is the aphrodisiaic. It evokes the erotic, which is both life
and death, productive of both taboo and transgression, discontinuous and
continuous states. The monk does not need to give him a drug, only a
warning.
The text is sceptical about priests and nuns, Buddhists and Taoists,
wet-nurses and go-betweens (R.1.12.252). Significantly, what is true of
the Indian monk was true also of Immortal Wu (chapter 29). He makes
Wu Yueniang one of the least transgressive among the wives show
her face and her hand, which is extended . . . from the mouth of her

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sleeve, exposing her ten slender fingers (R.2.29.177). In describing the features of the faces of the women, and making Li Jiaoer, the second wife,
move in front of him and saying her movement is like a snake
(R.2.29.178), Wu eroticises them, evoking their sensuality, while giving
them death-warnings. What seems counsel to reflection (taboo) incites
towards the loss of restraint, opening up heterogeneous possibilities to
the self (transgression). Perhaps Wu and the monk are one, or, if their
appearance implies a repetition, they may exemplify the Freudian
uncanny, which comprises repetition.16 Like the aphrodisiac, both are
the pharmakon, medicine and poison at once, like a taboo, and transgression of a taboo. For Derrida, the pharmaceutical remedy is essentially
harmful because it is artificial . . . the pharmakon goes against natural
life: not only life unaffected by any illness, but even sick life, or rather
the life of the sickness (Dissemination, p. 100). It weakens the concept
of the natural, so inciting transgression. It bring[s] into the text a
leaning towards the magic virtues to the force whose effects are hard to
master, a dynamics that constantly surprises the one who tries to manipulate it as master and as subject (p. 97). Derrida links the pharmakon to
writing, saying that textuality being constituted by differences and by
differences from differences it is by nature absolutely heterogeneous and
is constantly composing with the forces that tend to annihilate it
(p. 98). The same is true of this novel. The pharmakon is heterogeneous,
like Wu or the Indian monk, telling Ximen Qing:
I am only a poor monk. My name is everywhere the same. I come
from a foreign land, from the deep pine forest of India, from the
temple of the Frozen Mansions. I roam about the world dispensing
remedies to give ease to men. (E.2.49.306)
The remedy he gives to Ximen Qing, who wants something supplementary
to give new ardour is like the erotic, which cannot be tied into any system
of definable meaning. It breaks with known systems of thought, supplementing and destroying them.
The aphrodisiac reintroduces death into sexuality. No wonder Wu
Yueniang says, earlier than the visit of the Indian monk, that her
husband has swallowed a soul-disorienting drug (R.2.26.106). Derrida
compares the pharmakon with Rouseaus supplement.17 In chapter 50,
the turning-point, the additive-collection is complete. Ximen Qing takes
spirits with the drug, gets out a case of sex instruments, and adds from it
two forms of support to his penis, a silver clasp and a sulphur ring.
Despite his excess, it seems that sex for him is a Derridean chain of supplements, as if substitutions for his and the others body are needed to
remedy desires deficiency. Derridas supplement makes everything

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which seems substantial, only substitutive, compensating for an originary

absence, as when discussing Rousseaus masturbation, his dangerous
supplement, which occurs after love-making:
If the presence that it then gives itself is the substitutive symbol of
another presence, it has never been possible to desire that presence
in person before this play of substitution and this symbolic experience of auto-affection. The thing itself does not appear outside of
the symbolic system that does not exist without the possibility of
auto-affection.18
The other, who should guarantee presence, must be compensated for
by the fantasy engendered within auto-eroticism, which is not just supplementary (in the sense of coming after) to heterosexual experience, but
its pre-condition. Though Rousseaus onanism comes after love-making
demonstrating the latters inferiority, whereas any onanism in Jin Ping
Mei is preparatory to intercourse, the excess Ximen Qing embodies is
engendered not so much from surplus energy but from lack. Alongside
these supplements, the text is full of signs that various properties, which
read like the Freudian fetish, must supplement the womens narcissism.
Chapter 28 in particular is full of searches and exchanges of intimate
properties which charm and act substitutionally: silver hairnet rings, a
handkerchief and shoes, are all exchanged.
Sexuality within Jin Ping Mei is accompanied often by a violence
which affirms the domination of the discontinuous self, entailing,
often, a masculine, feudal, forcing of the woman. Are such sexual acts
forms of eroticism, where the subject loses identity? No, if we consider
how the sexual games are all codified, even if that codification itself is
part of a transgressive play of the text. We should also note how often
the violence is feminine. Pan Jinlians jealousy produces sadistic acts by
which she asserts her identity: apart from chapter 58, another example
appears in chapter 8, in beating her maid, Yinger, after being deserted
by Ximen Qing for the first time. Yinger is her husbands daughter by
his first wife; beating her repeats her violence towards her husband, Wu
the elder. It also displaces violence felt towards Ximen Qing. Her jealousy
is inseparable from her love, but the violence is hardly transgressive, feudal
rather, sadistic, wanting discontinuous being. Yet she craves the sexual,
and allows herself to suffer masochistically in chapter 27.19 The erotic
appears in more unintentional acts.
Chapter 71 provides an instance of these, as the second of a sequence
where Ximen Qing goes with Judicial Commissioner Xia to the capital to
thank the emperor for a promotion. He is at the height of his prosperity.
The official He Yonghsou, about to move to Ximen Qings Qinghe [Clear

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Stream] District, entertains him. They are joined by Hes uncle, Eunuch
He, whose being and name imply his ruined state. Because it is cold,
Ximen Qing is offered his clothes, which are green, as if acquiring the
Eunuchs identity in this ceremonious and ordered moment. Eunuch He
insists that Ximen Qing stays with him in his study in the garden:
Ximen Qing, lying on the bed, watched the moonbeams playing on
the windows. He tossed about, but could not sleep. [Il se tournait et
retournait sans pouvoir dormir (Levy 2.547).] He heard the drip, drip,
drip of the water-clock. He saw the tall shadows of the plants upon
the casement. The cold wind rattled the window-panes. He had now
been away from home for some time and was thinking of calling
Wang Jing to sleep with him. Suddenly, he heard a woman speaking
very softly outside the window. He wrapped his cloak about him, put
on his slippers, and quietly opened the door. He looked out. The
Lady of the Vase [Li Pinger] stood there, her hair like mist. She
was dressed in simple, beautiful clothes, and a white coat covered
her snow-white body. She wore soft slippers, yellow coloured,
upon her dainty feet. She stood there in the moonlight. (E.3.71.293)
The French translation emphasises the significance of repetition which
works on Ximen Qing, lying in bed. Li Pinger has died: she appears as a
ghost, and this is a dream. She says she has a new home where she must
go (alluding to reincarnation). He makes love to her, as a ghost. Afterwards
she warns him not to drink, but to go home to bed, because that fellow is
only waiting his chance to destroy you meaning the ghost of her previous husband, Hue Xixu. He had appeared to her in one dream just
before the death of her son, Guange (chapter 59), and in another after
his death. After warning him, Ximen Qing and the dead sixth wife walk
into the moonlit street, arriving at white double doors, which Li Pinger
says belongs to the house she will be born in. That she would be reborn
had been foretold by Master Xu in chapter 62 (E.3.62.1445) after her
death. She runs into this house. Ximen Qing tries to stop her, finds she
has gone, wakes and finds that he has been dreaming, but that there was
a pool upon [the bedclothes] that seemed to show that all had not been
in his imagination. He could still smell the delicate scent of her body
upon the bed, and the lips which she had kissed were still sweet
(E.3.71.294). There has been no sexual relation, no event, but there are
its traces, testifying to what has not happened. This supplementary ejaculation means something.
Warning him, Li Pinger returns to the dreams experienced in life. In
the first, her dead husband says that he will accuse her in the court of the
underworld (E.3.59.83). He echoes the statement within the poem of

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chapter 14 which testifies to these events (cited earlier). But the appearance of the ghost in chapter 59 and its words do not give more
authority to that poem; cannot, since the voice that speaks to Li Pinger
is heard within her dream. In some way, it is her voice, a heterogeneity
within her unhappiness that speaks, and which she recognises when she
says Strange! Strange! on waking (E.3.59.83). She has been grasping the
sleeve of the ghost; waking, she finds she is grasping Guanges sleeve:
dead husband and soon-to-be-dead son are identifiable.
The dream returns in chapter 60, after the death of Guange. It connects with the dream of chapter 71:
One day, at the beginning of the ninth month, it was cold and the
west wind blew chill. She [Li Pinger] was in her room alone. The
bed was cold: the lonely moon cast its beams upon the window.
She was thinking of her baby and sighed deeply several times. Suddenly she seemed to hear someone tapping on the window. She
called her maid, but the maids were sleeping soundly and there
was no reply. She rose from her bed, put on her shoes and an embroidered gown, went to the door, opened it and looked out. Hue Xixu
was there with Guange in his arms. He told her that he had a new
house and asked her to go with him. But she would not leave
without Ximen Qing. She refused him and tried to take the child
from him. He pushed her and made her fall upon the ground.
Then she woke up and found it was a dream. Her body was
bathed in sweat and she sobbed till dawn. (E.3.60.90-91)
Li Pingers experiences before, during and after her dream may be paralleled with the experience of Ximen Qing in chapter 71, so much that
the reader of chapter 71, following chapter 60, could deduce that the
experience anticipates his death, if not causing it. It almost suggests that
his death takes place in this chapter out of melancholia (rather than
from sexual excitement). So he is already dead before he dies in chapter
79: chapter 71 becoming that which most approaches the idea of continuity. An epitaph also seems to be pronounced or written for Ximen Qing,
or, more precisely, for what his household embodies, in Li Pingers formal,
official words: That is my house (the possessive pronoun is in the Chinese
but not in E.3.71.294)). She points to the new house to which she must go.
His house is empty, dead, like him. The dominant image is of whiteness
mourning, lack of life, the power of the moon, the feminine. Hua Zixu as
ghost, was the man in white: all testifies to death in life.
The chapter continues with the drinking ginger tea ceremony: this
associates with the ginger extract that failed to revive their baby, and
which did not prevent Song Hulians suicide. The next night, after

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further ceremonial work in the capital has been completed, with the gift of
clothes passed on from the Emperor to the Eunuch to Ximen Qing,
the boys sing to the men (Ximen Qing and Captain Ho). In the middle
of the night, the boy Wang Jing comes spontaneously to Ximen Qing,
like the womans ghost the previous night, and he takes him to bed.
They kissed each other and he found the boys lips very fragrant
(E.3.71.297). The relation of that to the sweetness of Ximen Qings
own lips after the phantasmal kisses of Li Pinger is striking; it is not
clear now whether the experience is masculine or feminine, nor which is
more ghostly. The journey homewards the next day risks danger from
the woods, and takes the men via the Yellow Dragon Temple, which,
without fire and light, perhaps emblematises the empire, as a ruined patriarchal structure. Ximen Qing, his own food-supply supplemented by the
abbot, sleeps the night in its ruined quarters. The temple ruins allegorise
his ruined state, his fear, and melancholia.
Much may be said about this sequence, which contrasts ceremonial
politeness and the erotic. Desire appears from the state of lack: the man
is alone in his bed, and in such circumstances, desire cannot be coded; it
draws him towards either homosexuality with Wang Jing on both
nights, or to a fantasy of the dead woman, with whom he imagines having
a sexual relation again, which is a fantasy, but not just that, because it leaves
objective marks, since he ejaculates.20 Creating Li Pinger in his dream
includes her dreams. Dream unfolds within dream: dreaming expresses
not only the individuals thoughts, but the others dreams: this entry
into the text of another memory (that of Li Pingers dreams) which
Ximen Qing could not have had personally, is analogous to the appearance
of poems and citations within the text. It marks an otherness within the
text, which surfaces from unconscious, unknown sources. Ximen Qing is
seen in chapter 71 in a way conflicting with the masculine violence with
which he took his wives earlier. There is a sense of a self open to the
other, as opposed to a self which can only be seen from an external
point of view. The latter, discontinuous, closed to the other, acts aggressively. Self-enclosed, it can only be seen from the outside, so that the
text makes no attempt till now to approach Ximen Qings thoughtprocesses.
Chapter 71s eroticism implies something like assenting to life up to
the point of death. It includes the homosexuality which feminises him, as
everything in this sequence of events has that effect. Eroticism is not, then,
a violent exercise of libidinal energy at this point, but an opening of the
door, in dream, to the other. The dream is erotic, coming not just from
Ximen Qings being, but from the other. The text has within it many
places where a voice from the outside is heard: the episodes of chapters
29 and 49 are examples. But chapter 71 ends with solitude, Batailles

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discontinuity, which is a ruined state. The sequence of events indicates

that sexuality cannot be seen as one type. Part of the episodes pathos
has to do with the unspoken memory of the child of Ximen Qing and
Li Pinger. In her earlier dream, the child Guange was held by her first
husband, like the agent of death, the vengeful past which had claimed
the present. The absence of the child, the point that the reader must
supply the presence of its absence, suggests how the sexual cannot be
seen in terms of bodily satisfaction.
Desire for a child motivates Pan Jinglian, and her jealousy of Li
Pinger, and of the child, whom her cat destroys. It motivates Wu Yueniang,
who miscarries in chapter 33, and receives an aid from Nun Wang to
become pregnant in chapter 50 (paralleling the giving of the aphrodisiac).
It makes sexual activity to be rooted in unutterable desires. Some
expressions of sexuality are rooted in lack, disguised as a desire for domination. The aphrodisiac, far from exciting sexual desire that knows no
bounds, only brings out something else which ghosts the mans libertinage:
fear of failure, which silently affirms the melancholy of discontinuity.
Hence, growing addiction to sexual supplements: as in chapter 75, when
Qimen Xing goes for sex with Ruyi, Guanges ex-wet-nurse. He asks
Pan Jinlian for the love-instruments. She objects; he answers: But I am
so accustomed to them I dont know what to do without them
(E.3.75.356). But no supplements are needed in the erotic dream of
chapter 71, and the homosexuality of Ximen Qing is no supplement to heterosexuality, but is eroticism, born out of melancholia.
Ximen Qings drive is only sometimes directed towards known,
material goals; hence the texts interest in homosexuality, as confusing
gender-roles and relationships and creating the polymorphously perverse.
In chapter 50, the house-servant Daian, who inherits what remains of
Ximen Qings fortunes, becomes strangely eroticised after escorting the
Indian monk back home and breaks into word-games with homosexual
implications (E.2.50.314316). Ximen Qing takes a servant-boy
(Shutong), as a lover in chapter 34, having just adjudicated and punished
a case of incest. Shutong dresses himself up as a singing girl, with powerful
effects on the drunken listening males (R.2.35.342). The boys drag is
another example of the supplement. Ximen Qings inconsistency of
standard is repeated in chapter 76, when Master Wen is dismissed
after being accused of homosexual rape of Huatong, Ximen Qings
boy-servant.
As if continuing Ximen Qing posthumously, his son-in-law, Chen
Jingji, who committed adultery with Pan Jianliang, now having lost
everything, including his wife, lives among beggars, becomes a Taoist
monk, and the male prostitute of Jin Zongming, who is one of them
(E.4.93.2745). He robs half the temples capital, and brings on the

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death of Ren, the priest (chapter 94). This effectively reduces him to
beggary, and to prostitution with Hon Lin, foreman to builders working
on a temple (E.4.96.315 8). In this love-making, all stabilities of identity
based on gender disappear in a carnivalizing of sexuality and textuality:
Chen Jingji calls Hon Lin brother, sweetheart and husband (literally,
sweet brother, sweet darling, sweet husband, sweet Daddy). The incident
brings out something obscenely but obscurely ambiguous within his name,
which is commented on by the workmen. Their joke about penetration is
an instance of the word-games he and Ximen Qing indulged in. They add:
he is half one thing and half another (E.4.96.317). This Chinese threecharacter phrase, two tailed man may mean hermaphrodite, or, according to Levy, imply bisexuality; that which is monstrous, outside all codes
of naming.
It produces a prediction from another of the warning figures of this
text, a one-eyed blind Taoist itinerant, Ye Dao, whose speech draws attention five times to his smooth face, like a woman, and speaks about him
being married three times, drawing ribald comments from the workers
that he may have been married once, but is now a wife has, indeed,
been a wife twice. And Ye Dao foretells his death, telling him to avoid
the flowers and willows i.e. prostitutes. The teacher Mas words
which Ye Dao quotes, He whose mountain root is broken will waste all
his substance in his youth. . . . Your upper half is short and the lower
half long (E.4.96.318) contain two Chinese characters appearing in Hua
Zixu hua (spend) and xu (non-existent, or waste) in reverse: Chen
Jingji spends in a carnivalistic overthrow of order (everything in him is
inverted).21
With dramatic irony, the chapter closes with Zhang Shengs appearance, arrived to take Chen Jingji to the house of his master, Major Zhou,
who has married Pang Chunmei, previously his concubine. Chen Jingji
reverts to heterosexuality in this house, through his affair with Pang
Chunmei, which indeed means that he is married three times, but his
destiny is to be killed by Zhang Sheng, lying naked and feminised, in
his bed, and his head cut off (E.4.99.351 2).
The double meaning of Ye Daos words is interesting. The workmen
find Chen Jingji ambiguous, male and female together, because he shows
something noticed in his father-in-law and others, a tendency to decode
all forms of sexual identity. Prophecies are as ambiguous as sexuality:
what happens textually, in language-games, happens sexually. When sexuality takes multiform shapes, it points up the need of language to name, but
threatens single definition. That Chen Jingji is so ambivalent makes him a
figure destabilizing nature, the supplement, the pharmakon. His death is
followed by the revenge execution of Zhang Sheng, excited by Pang
Chunmei. Her husband, Zhou, who orders it, dies in battle in chapter

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100, leaving Pang Chunmei to have sex with the servants, dying during
sexual intercourse, like Ximen Qing.
Homosexuality, at the margins of this text, indicates its doubleness:
neither supporting a moralistic reading dismissing sexuality, nor making
it meaningless. The erotic banishes established meanings, as part of that
which disorients the self: as the pharmakon, it indicates a prior lack of
that which orients the self. Jin Ping Mei has been censored for its attention
to sexual excess: many readers have recoiled from its obscenities like Pan
Jinlian from her sullied shoes. But the text engages with that concern for
absolute purity, from a transgressive figure who disturbs even Immortal
Wu, by its doubleness, recognising that what disturbs order and form
does so by affronting the self. The text disturbs and questions the reader
through what cannot be assimilated, neither speaking for the taboo, nor
praising transgression as though taboos were needless. Richly realist, it
might seem to support known standards and taboos, but the sexuality
empowers its realism, in giving it its structure. The sexual drive is identifiable in Jin Ping Meis poetic character, where it accrues sources from the
outside which cannot ground the text, or give it authority, which lead
towards a dream-space constituted poetically, and towards the excessive
and the perverse. These, as with its influence on Hunglou Meng, change
patterns of writing and reading. They force readers to think what is
outside, what heterogeneity constitutes literature.
Hong Hong Shue Yan University; University of Manchester

Notes

1 David Toy Roy, The Plum in the Golden Vase: or, Chin Ping Mei: vol. 1,
The Gathering (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993), p. xx. Roys
second volume, The Rivals appeared in 2001, going up to chapter 40, vol. 3,
The Aphrodisiac, in 2006.
2 These are A and B (C version includes commentary by Chang Chu-po, made
between 1666 and 1684, but the text derives from B). See P.D. Hanan, The
Text of the Chin Ping Mei, Asia Major, n.s. 9 (1962), pp. 1 57. Roy (note 1)
translates A, but the only extant full English translation uses what Roy considers the inferior B: Clement Egerton, The Golden Lotus 4 vols. (1933, Singapore: Graham Brash 1979). We have cited translations as R (Roy) or E
(Egerton), plus volume plus chapter plus page-number. Andre Levy translates
B more fully than Egerton as Jin Ping Mei: Fleur en Fiole dOr 2 vols (Paris:
Gallimard, 1985). We use Roy for the first forty chapters and Egerton for
the rest, consulting Levy, and Chinese editions from which we have translated
independently: for A, Jin Ping Mei cihua 2 vols. (Taipei: San Wen, 1980),

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3
4
5

7
8

138

and in 6 vols. (Hong Kong: Taiping, 1982), a photocopy from Beijing Library,
and for B, Hsin-ko hsiu-hsiang pi-ping 5 vols. (Hong Kong: Cosmos Books,
1998). We have preferred, like Levy, to use pinyin rather than Wade-Giles
transliterations (Roys choice), so quotations from Roy have silently changed
the names into pinyin. Disputes over which text to prefer or whether to
welcome both are not discussed, and, writing for Western readers, we
omit Chinese characters.
A plot summary appears in Peter H. Rushton, The Jin Ping Mei and the NonLinear Dimensions of the Chinese Novel (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1994),
pp. 259 338.
Shi Naian and Luo Guanzhong, Outlaws of the Marsh 3 vols, trans. Sidney
Shapiro (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1993), 1.348 439.
For introductory readings, see C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel: a Critical
Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), Andrew H. Plaks,
Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1977), especially pp. 115 124, which contains Roys comments on Chan Chu-Po, Plaks, The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), and Andre Levy, Perspectives
on the Jin Ping Mei: Comments and Reminiscences of a Participant in the Jin
Ping Mei Conference, CLEAR 8.1 (1986), pp. 1 6. For more detailed criticisms in English, all drawn on, see John L. Bishop, A Colloquial Short
Story in the Novel Chin Ping Mei, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 17.3/
4 (1954), pp. 394 402, Chaoyang Liao, Three Readings in the Jinpingmei
cihua, CLEAR 6.1/2 (1984), pp. 77 99, David T. Roy, The Use of Songs as
a Means of Self-Expression and Self-Characterization in the Chin Ping Mei,
CLEAR 20 (1998), pp. 101 126, and Ming Dong Gu, Brocade of Human
Desires: the Poetics of Weaving in the Jin Ping Mei and Traditional Commentaries, The Journal of Asian Studies 63.2 (2004), pp. 333 356. For feminist
criticism, see Chien Ying-Ying, Sexuality and Power: a Feminist Reading of
Chin Ping Mei, Tamkang Review 19.1 4 (1988 1989), pp. 607 629,
and Naifei Ding, Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2002). For one source of the novel, see Charles
R. Stone, The Fountainhead of Chinese Erotica: The Lord of Perfect Satisfaction
(Ruyijin Zhuan) (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003): a text and
critical introduction to a mid-sixteenth century work named in the Preface
to the A text, which Roy believes indicates the author (R.1.455 6).
See Mary Scott, The Image of the Garden in Jin Ping Mei and Hongloumeng,
CLEAR 142 (1987), pp. 83 94. For the garden, see Jeremy Tambling,
Inside and Outside the Dream of Red Mansions, Tamkang Review 24
(2003), pp. 63 94.
A Chinese folk belief, before the souls of the dead are sent back from the
underworld to be reincarnated, they are given a soul-disorienting drug so
that they will no longer remember the events of their former lives (R.2.497).
See Pei-jing Li, Female Bodies and Bound Feet: Fetish Systems in Jin Ping
Mei, Tamkang Review 30.1 (1999), pp. 169 207. See Freud, Fetishism in
On Sexuality: The Penguin Freud vol. 7 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977),

Louis Lo and Jeremy Tambling How excess structures

10

11
12

13
14
15

16
17

pp. 355 9. For Marx on commodity fetishism, see Capital vol. 1, trans. Ben
Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 163 77. For abjection, see
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection trans. Leon Roudiez
(New York: Columbia University Press 1982). Jealousy in our discussion is
female; for male jealousy see Louis Lo, Male Jealousy: Literature and Film
(London: Continuum, 2008).
For the fox fairy, compare Nietzsche on anthropomorphism: What then is
truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms
in short a sum of human relations, which have been transposed, and
embelleished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm,
canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one
has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and
without sensuous power. Quoted in Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: Life as Metaphor, The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press, 1985), p. 167. As anthropomorphism, the fox fairy inhabits the shoe,
and gives it its (fetishistic) value.
Cao Xueqin and Gao E, The Story of the Stone, trans. David Hawkes and John
Minford, 5 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973 1986). In chapter 5, Jia
Bao-yu visits the Land of Illusion and the Fairy Disenchantment performs
The Dream of Golden Days (Hawkes, 1.124).
See also Katherine Carlitz, The Rhetoric of Chin ping mei (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1986), for example p. 95.
In the plaint, Pan Jinlian proves herself to be both a melancholic and sadistic:
on this, see Freud: The behaviour of [complaining] patients, too, now becomes
much more intelligible. Their complaints are really plaints in the old sense of
the word. They are not ashamed and do not hide themselves, since everything
derogatory that they say about themselves is at bottom said about someone else.
Moreover, they are far from evincing towards those around them the attitude of
humility and submissiveness that would alone befit such worthless people . . .
Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, On Metapsychology: The Penguin Freud
vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 257.
Georges Bataille, Eroticism (1957), trans. Mary Dalwood (London: Marion
Boyars, 1987), p. 11.
Jacques Derrida, From Restricted to General Economy: An Hegelianism
without Reserve, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London:
Routledge, 1978), p. 263.
Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence, One-Way Street and Other Writings,
trans. Edmond Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1979), p. 138.
Note Derridas critique of this: Force of law: The Mystical Foundation of
Authority, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell
(London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 152 153.
Freud, The Uncanny, Art and Literature: The Penguin Freud vol. 14 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 360 361.
Jacques Derrida, Platos Pharmacy, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 97.

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18 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 154.
19 Freud virtually roots masochism in sadism in such a passage as the turning
around of an instinct upon the subjects own self is made plausible by the
reflection that masochism is actually sadism turned around upon the subjects
own ego, and that exhibitionism includes looking at his own body. Instincts
and their Vicissitudes, On Metapsychology: The Penguin Freud vol. 11
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 124.
20 See Jacques Lacan, The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its
Power, Ecrits: a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977):
Desire is that which is manifested in the interval that demand hollows
within itself, in as much as the subject, in articulating the signifying chain,
brings to light the want-to-be [manque-a`-etre], together with the appeal to
receive the complement from the Other, if the Other, the locus of speech, is
also the locus of this want, or lack (p. 263).
21 Mountain root is a physiognomical term used by Immortal Wu with reference to Ximen Daijie (R.2.29.181) and Pang Chunmei (R.2.29.182) where
in each case mountain is translated as nose: so the root of ones nose.
Pang Chunmei as phallicly empowered woman outlives Chen Jingji whose
nose is broken. Sexual difference in this text seems not to be established on
the basis of (non-)possession of the phallus.

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