Organizer and Discussant: Stephen H. West, University of California, Berkeley
Chair: Ching-hsi Perng, National Taiwan University
Rites of Performance: Ghosts in Dreams in Yuan zaju
Karin Myhre, University of California, Berkeley
Ghosts in Yuan dramas return to the land of the living for a particular reason. Inevitably some kind of revenge is involved; it is for this purpose that the ghost will search out a living figure who can identify and bring to light wrongs it suffered in life. The appearance of a ghost in these Northern dramas demands action, and the play's climax and conclusion revolve around exposure and redress of the ghost's grievance. Atonement by the living characters both banishes the ghost and reestablishes, within the world of the play, adherence to a conservative moral order.
The actions of ghosts in Yuan dramas are quite different from those in other kinds of literary works. Unlike some narrative accounts in which the actions, purposes, and even presence of a ghost are ambiguous, the identity and aims of ghosts are explicit in Yuan works. What is most unbelievable about these plays is not the existence or behavior of the ghost, but the plays' miraculously neat moral solutions. The subjects of ghost plays in the Yuan corpus center on topics that must have been on the minds of its audiences: violent crime and the efficacy of the courts, unbridled female sexuality, the competing obligations of ties of blood and marriage, and the legitimacy of government. Like a religious ritual that abstracts elements of the real world and arranges them in a desired order, ghosts act as catalysts, bringing about the enactment of an ideal social order in the world of the play in a way that might better be understood as an invocation than a literary exploration.
Revenants of the dead frequently appear to the living in these dramas through dreams. This mode of communication is suited to figures, like ghosts whose messages are both more meaningful and more urgent than other messages, while at the same time being less comprehensible or credible. This paper explores how dreams, the medium of ghosts' communication, mirror ghosts' own function of exploiting the occasional and ambiguous connections between the worlds of life and death, sleep and wakefulness, and the influences of one world on another.
The Taishan Pilgrimage in Yuan-time Drama
Wilt L. Idema, Leiden University
Among the thirty zaju preserved in Yuan-time printings and the three preserved xiwen from the Yongle dadian no less than four plays deal with the Taishan pilgrimage, either as a side issue or as the main topic. In Hanshanji (The Sweat-shirt) by Zhang Guobin, a young man and his wife become the victims of a criminal on their way to Tai'an, the seat of the main temple of the Great Emperor of the Eastern Marchmount (Dongyue dadi). In Xiao Sun tu(Little Sun the Butcher), the trip from Kaifeng to Tai'an is described in some detail, whereas in Zheng Tingyu's Kanqiannu (A Slave to his Money) a father meets the son he had to sell twenty years ago in the main temple during a pilgrimage. In the anonymous Xiao Zhang tu fener jiumu (Little Zhang the Butcher Immolates his Son and Saves his Mother) the main hero decides to sacrifice his only begotten child to the Great Emperor of the Eastern Marchmount in order to save his sick and ailing mother from death.
These plays are not only interesting for their literary value and their social commentary (in Ming editions of Hanshanji and Kanqiannu the long and spirited diatribes against the abuses of the rich have been largely edited out), but they also present a picture of the pilgrimage that is at variance with the information for the Ming and Qing dynasties. The Yuan plays present the pilgrimage as primarily a regional affair; the gods that are worshipped are still all male and the pilgrims too are primarily male. The popularity of the topic may well be connected with the popularity of the cult of the Great Emperor of the Eastern Marchmount whose temples as a rule were all provided with stages. Some of the stages from the twelfth-fourteenth centuries are still standing.
Proper Naming Practice as the Key to Maintaining Familial and Social Order in the
Hanshan ji
Andrea S. Goldman, University of California, Berkeley
Names of characters in Yuan zaju often reveal personality traits. Functioning not unlike painted faces in more modern Chinese opera, names in Yuan drama alert the audience to a character's moral fiber or class/status background. The Yuan drama Hanshan ji offers a case in point. In this melodrama about the dissolution and reunion of a family, the good-hearted but wayward son is named Zhang "Filial to friends" (Xiaoyou); the Zhang family savior is Zhao "Resurrector of the Grandson" (Xingsun). The villain is denied any traces of humanity by his name, Chen "the Tiger" (Hu).
In Hanshan ji, however, names are more than just character designations. The familial titles characters use to address others in the drama also constitute a type of naming. The names and titles all presuppose a relationship to others. A character's understanding of his/her proper relationship to others in the family is crucial to his/her ability to comprehend and observe social norms, and it is this understanding (or lack thereof) that is reflected through a character's naming practices. Inappropriate naming leads to chaos; proper naming mends the ruptured family. The play suggests that the ability to perceive one's social role relative to others and to express that, in part, through proper naming protocol is the essence of social interaction; it is that which distinguishes humans from beasts: a very Confucian message, indeed.
Using the Maiwangguan redaction of Hanshan ji, I will show how this edition is preoccupied with naming practices. The ultimate act of naming is preserved for the emperor, the audience for whom this version of the drama was intended. Through the play's denouement in which the emperor distinguishes/names the good and the evil and apportions out rewards and punishments, naming is extended beyond the sphere of family and to society as a whole. The emperor's proclamation is a final "rectification of names" that, once again, allows "the emperor to be emperor," "the father to be father," and "the son to be son." Finally, through comparison with the two other extant editions, I will show how Ming editors mold the script to conform to ever more restrictive definitions of proper Confucian relationships.