Vol. 9 No. 2 Late Imperial ChinaDecember 1988 A CASE FOR CONFUCIAN SEXUALITY: THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL Yesou Puyan R. Keith McMahon Introduction Some books are not necessarily good literature but are all the same unique in marking extremes of creative determination. Yesou puyan, or A Country Codger Puts His Words out to Sun, is just such a book, written by an eccentric polymath who never amounted to anything in what counted in China, official life. ' In his novel China is being threatened by demons, barbarians, and forces of Buddhist and Taoist perversion, which only a thorough Confucian revival can eradicate. The hero is a latter day Confucian superman who (like the author) never passes the official exams, but manages to rise to a position of advisor to the emperor, conquer the forces of evil and even to eradicate Buddhism from the earth. The novel combines a strict orthodox moral vision with extensive descriptions of bizarre, unorthodox behavior which often take sexual form. The author portrays scenes of bestiality, sexual vampirism, and genital acrobatics. Throughout pages of erotic danger and adventure, the hero displays superhuman sexual control and unswervingly preaches that sex is for procreation only: "... the two ways of yin and yang are only meant to proliferate Heaven and Earth and to continue the descent of the ancestors. They are in no way meant for lustful enjoyment." The genitals should be looked upon as "ordinary, tiring things—only then are they like treasures" (ch. 68, 8b). At one-hundred and fifty-four chapters2 Yesou puyan is one of the longest Chinese novels ever written. Twentieth-century specialists have placed it in a group of Qing works called novels of erudition or scholar-novels. 1 Two editions of the book are used in this essay: the 154-chapter Shijie shuju version (Taibei, 1975, fourth edition), which deletes sexually explicit passages, and the 152-chapter edition at Beijing University Library with a date of 1881, published by the Piling huizhen lou, which provides the erotic passages but has lacunae elsewhere. Page numbers refer to the Taiwan edition if in simple Arabic numerals, and to the Beijing University Library edition if like this: la, lab, etc. Chapter numbers, if given without page references, refer to the Taibei edition unless otherwise noted. 2 According to Hou Jian ( 1 974), the book is over one million characters long; see p. 1 1 . 32 A Case for Confucian Sexuality: The Eighteenth-Century Novel Yesou Puyan33 The author is Xia Jingqu (1705-1787), a zhusheng and native of Jiangyin in Jiangsu Province. Like other scholar-novelists, he has chosen the novel as a form into which he can pour his vast erudition: besides the usual core of Confucian learning in history, poetry and moral thought, he is fluent in mathematics, astronomy, military science, and medicine. But he is unlike the other erudite novelists in his imaginings and/or observations of sexual behavior. For this reason C. T. Hsia has dismissed the author: "Despite his Confucian orthodoxy, Hsia Ching-ch'ii ... has a licentious imagination and places his hero Wen Pai tzu Su-ch'en, a supreme genius in all civil and military arts, in every kind of improbable adventure."3 Using Freudian analysis, Hou Jian writes of the "abnormal psychology" exhibited in Yesou puyan and refers to the hero's "neurosis," "Oedipus complex," and "mother fixation."4 To be sure, Xia's penchant for describing peculiarities or aberrations of sexual and excretory body functions would cause many readers to wonder how "decent" or "normal" he was. But for now I prefer to take Xia at his word and to resolve the tension between "licentious" or "abnormal" imagination and strong, self-styled Confucian orthodoxy as a clean-cut division between "licentiousness" outside in the world and "correctness" inside the mind. I will view him not as a "subconsciously" perverted orthodox writer, but as an orthodox moralist who for once chooses not to repress the consideration, in unsparing terms, of the problems and fantasies of sexuality. In this view, Xia challenges readers to find one instant in which he is actually enjoying his lurid descriptions. He wants his "pornography" to be taken not as vicarious indulgence, but as...