"Canonizing Pornography". - Cluster Asia and Europe

Canonizing Pornography. A (Foolish?) Woman’s Sexual Education in Chipozi zhuan
by
Paola Zamperini
Amherst College 1
Essay forthcoming in Re-thinking the Canon in Traditional Chinese Fiction and Drama,
Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2009
1 My gratitude goes to all the participants and discussants of the conference “Re-thinking the Canon: An
International Conference on Traditional Chinese Fiction and Drama,” Chinese University of Hong Kong,
Hong Kong, January 3-5 2008, where I presented the original version of this essay. I am very much indebted to
the input of the anonymous reviewers for this volume. I am also very thankful to professors Li Wai-yee, Wilt
Idema, Stephen Owen, Xiaofei Tian Owen, David Wang, and all the audience members who gave comments,
asked questions, and provided invaluable feedback when I presented an earlier version of this essay at Harvard,
on November 3, 2008.
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at first, and then has to rely on other women’s greater experience. A’Na’s school is a very
fluid space where young women take the initiative to open texts that do not belong to them,
such as the Shi Jing, and initiate random sexual encounters. She seems to be breaking new
ground and taboos, and to confuse socially acceptable behavior. So whereas Ana’s textual
discovery was stolen, illegitimate, Fragrant Jade’s is legitimized by her husband’s pedagogical
aims and her status as a married woman. Jade Scent learns in the comfort of her own house,
and does not have to read in secret: her husband educates her, procures the textbooks, and
turns the bedroom into a classroom. Vesperus’ wife is a willing student who has nothing to
hide and all to gain from her sexual education. What remains similar in these two women’s
journey through sexuality and pleasure is their eventual fall from social grace. Thus, when
Jade Scent, inspired by her legitimate education to pursue pleasure in an individual way that
leads her away from the domestic confines of a monogamous marriage, she too is punished,
not unlike A’Na, with public humiliation (and in Jade Scent’s case, suicide).
It could be argued that Chipozi zhuan, by mapping out the natural development of a
woman’s sexual awakening and maturity, emphasizes their natural quality and thus
legitimizes them. Not unlike the eighth century Dalefu by Bai Xingjian it celebrates the
pleasures of the flesh by chronicling the growth and the biological changes that enable boys
and girls to enter the circuit of adult sexuality. At the same time it also shows the dangers,
just like the Roupu tuan does, that manifest when that female appetite transcends the
boundaries of married life and of monogamous sexual intercourse (the man’s situation is
different, as Keith McMahon has so compellingly shown, as he can be polygynous, as long as
he does not transgress into adultery). Lust may be natural in a woman, but it must be
orthodox: it cannot be polyandric, except in courtesans and prostitutes, but that is a whole
another story (and paper!).
A’Na’s defiance of her parents, her disrespect for her husband and her proscribed
gender roles lead her straight to her eventual capitulation to the dominant Confucian ethical
framework and to her escape into Buddhism and celibacy, because a socially disgraced
woman like herself had not other choice, even in fiction. Pornography’s other raison d’etre, in
this sense, is to climax in a celebration of sexually normative behavior. Explicit sexual
representation is always about regulation, in other words, about the normalization of sexual
mores and modes of intercourse with the other or the same sex. Love and sex, in other words,
are almost always inevitably about the law. 29 The laws of (individual) desire and those of
society may conflate or clash: and yet no fiction writer can invoke the one without defining
the other. In this sense, all the rules and rituals that were sanctioned in Ming times,
including filial piety and its violations, coexist and intertwine necessarily within late imperial
Chinese fiction. From this perspective, Chipozi zhuan shows us how the reckless pursuit of
pleasure naturally morphs into the systematic violation of all the bonds, social, familial,
emotional, which make up the fabric of society. So A’Na undermines her bonds within her
family, her husband, his family, and in her neighborhood. By sleeping with servants, tutors,
and in-laws she creates that problematic chaos stemming from the lack of society’s
29 I am very thankful to professor David Wang, who with his incredibly helpful questions, helped me realize
how central the relationship between desire and the law is in terms of defining this work’s genre and meanings
(Harvard, November 2008).
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management of sexuality (especially women’s) that prescriptions such as chastity and incest
avoidance are meant to enforce. 30 As Godelier writes
[w]herever incest is condemned and at the same time practiced, it potentially and
really subverts, across the board, relations of cooperation and authority within the
family. For when incest is practiced, all of the individual kinship positions gradually
merge and fuse with one another and in the end are abolished, since the same
individual can end up being, for instance, the son and the husband of his mother as
well as the brother of the sons and daughters born of this union. 31
A’Na’s sexual drive is fundamentally asocial: while her goal is not to defy the rules that bind
and regulate her sex life and appetites for ideological reasons, it would seem that the author,
through her, particularly delights in breaking them, at least temporarily. Hence the
important role of fiction in pre-modern times and of pornography (and the internet in
modern and contemporary societies) to allow the iconoclastic delights of asocial sexual
behavior, especially when at the end there can be the promise of redemption and liberation
from the ego that drives it, as it is the case of Chipozi zhuan.
Thus, Chipozi zhuan’s novel approach to narrating female sexual transgressions ends
up, like many other late imperial tales of exceptional women, bringing women where they
belong, namely under male authority and straight back to the monogamous bedroom of
their husband, rightfully chosen by their parents. Perhaps the only possible reading that
allows for Chipozi zhuan to be read in a more problematic fashion is to understand the
author’s choice to write this story in literary Chinese as a forerunner of the literary move that
Deleuze and Guattari termed “the deterritorializations of a major language through a minor
literature written in the major language from a marginalized or minoritarian position.” In
other words, by choosing wenyan as the language of A’Na’s voice and story, the anonymous
Ming author could be seen here as taking on the “major” language of history, official
biographies, poetry, and of the cultural establishment, and putting it in the mouth of a
woman, whose voice is always meant as “minor”, thereby transforming this voice into one
with an enunciative value that transcends the individual’s story (in this case, A’Na’s) and
makes it collective in a politically significant way. 32 Seductive as this possibility is, however,
the fact remains that immanent, embodied, the yinxin/xing of women goes through the eye,
the, heart and the flesh, and it has nothing to do with subversive social practices, and all to
do with the intent of the writer and that of the reader. It does not see itself as either
iconoclastic or transgressive, just as “foolish” or “infatuated” when it escapes its proper place.
This escape can render female lust an interesting and titillating matter-out-place to sexually
arouse the reader, but in the end it provides the legitimate context for the acquisition and
application of sexual practices, and also of established gender norms.
30 This discussion, focused on incest in late imperial and modern Chinese fiction, is taken on in more depth in
my manuscript in progress “A Family Romance. Incest and Filial Piety in Zhang Ailing’s Xinjing.”
31 Maurice Godelier, “Afterword: Transformations and Lines of Evolution,” in Transformations of Kinship,
Maurice Godelier, Thomas R. Trautmann, and Franklin E. Tjon Sie Fat, editors. Washington : Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1998, 386.
32 Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F., Kafka. 17 and ff. .
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The School of Girls, or, The Woman’s Body Orgasmic. 33
“C’ést la meilleure chose du monde.”
In 1661, in Paris, a book came to an extremely tragic end. Its incineration in turn
launched it into a very long and profitable existence through the annals of French and
European literary history. Not that its fiery demise came unexpectedly. As a copy of the
anonymous L’école des filles, this particular volume had been on the lam, as it were, for quite
a few years. Louis XIV’s minister of finance, Nicolas Fouquet, had managed to conceal it in a
secret room in his mistress’ house, and thus to keep it away from the burning eyes (quite
literally) of the censors since 1655, when the entire first print of the work had been
incinerated, –with the exception of six copies, one of which had been given as a gift to
Fouquet. Michel Millot and Jean L’ange, the two men who paid for the text’s printing in
1655—but who were most likely not its authors—had been tried and found guilty that very
year. It is undeniable that compared with Claude Le Petit (1638–1662), who was burned at
stake for his satirical work Le Bordel des Muses, Millot and L’Ange got off relatively
unscathed: Millot was symbolically hanged and then burned in effigy, and L’Ange was
sentenced to three years of exile from Paris, a sentence that was most likely never enforced.
What was less predictable was that shortly thereafter the novel that they helped bring
into print and to the pyre would emerge like a phoenix from its ashes, and come in time to
be seen as the origin of the modern European pornographic novel. Though there are
different opinions as to whether or not this novel deserves such an “honor,” The School of
Girls is a very good counterpart for A’Na’s journey through pleasure. It is not, strictly
speaking, a first person narrative, but it does rely on a dialogue between two women to retell
of the sexual education of a young woman to an intended audience of other young female
readers, at least in theory (and this is something that will become a stable quality of French
pornography, as it is clear in Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, when he auspicates that
mothers will buy his book for their daughters). In this sense, it is meant to play the same
pedagogical role that Chipozi zhuan does for Vesperus and his wife. But the French author
takes his didactic imperative a step further, by making the book become, quite literally, the
penis that needs the feminine eyes/I for its successful reception. In this sense one could say
that this novel is revolutionary, in that it posits the reader as female, not just in terms of
gender, but also of sex. The poem that works as an epitaph to the novel makes this
interpretation indisputable:
Fucking writer from Cyprus,
Who in all your fucking writings
Show that to fuck well means to live well,
The countless arguments you teach
33 An earlier and less extensive version of this section was published as “Pornography”, in Oxford Encyclopedia
of Women in World History, Oxford University Press, 2007.
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To make people fuck in countless ways
Will not render your pen eternal.
No, what will make you famous forever
Is that in your fucking book,
In a novel way,
Your prose fucks us through the eyes. 34
The text, in other words, is not just a mirror for couplings and sexual intercourse: it
is sex, made, once more, text. The novel is built as a series of two dialogues that marks the
two stages (before and after) of the sexual education of Fanchon, a sixteen-year old girl from
a very respectable, albeit quite boring family. In the first dialogue the reader witnesses the
education of the young innocent girl through the words of the older, more experienced
cousin. Here, just like in Chipozi zhuan, verbal education equals seduction and initiation.
While there is no text equivalent to the forbidden Shijing that acts as a conduit of
education/corruption, words play a fundamental role in the training of the future libertine.
Much is made by the author that Fanchon is quite modest and inexperienced in many ways.
Just like the foolish woman of the Chinese source, Fachon hails from a “good” family, but
unlike A’NA, she lacks any curiosity towards the other sex. Her cousin, Susanne, older and
much more experienced, takes it upon herself to educate Fanchon to the pleasure of the flesh.
She begins her training by telling her younger cousin that sex is the best thing in the world.
Susanne then proceeds to tell her doltish cousin all about sex, beginning with the male
anatomy, including all the possible terminology for penis: entrance in heterosexual sexuality
is an entrance in a discourse that is at once physical, linguistic, and emotional.
The great and positive change for Fanchon is that pleasure is guaranteed. Indeed, for
Susanne, pleasure is unavoidable and almost synonymous with penetration. Even for a
female virgin, after the initial discomfort, orgasm is bound to manifest for any woman as a
result of genital stimulation through vaginal penetration. 35 The second dialogue takes places
after Fanchon’s loss of virginity at the hands, for lack of a better word, of her appropriately
named lover Robinet. This time is the young girl to speak, though the dynamics of her tale is
the same as her cousin’s, since again sex and pleasure become word. 36 The loss of virginity, in
Fanchon’s retelling, is described in tantalizing detail, no doubt for scenic effect. But it is an
34 Claude Le Petit, L’école des filles, p. 1101.
Auteur foutou d’un foutou livre,
Écrivain foutou de Cypris,
Qui dans tous tes foutous écrits
Fais voir que bien foutre est bien vivre,
Cent arguments foutous dont tu fais tes leçons,
Pour faire foutre en cent façons,
N’eterniseront pas ta plume.
Non, ce qui te rendra pour jamais glorieux,
C’est que dans ton foutou volume,
Par une nouvelle coutume,
Ta prose nous fout par les yeux.
35 Claude Le Petit, L’école des filles, p. 1142.
36 L’école des filles, p. 1154.
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indirect tale, and the two lovers are left, undisturbed, in the privacy of their alcove. Unlike it
is the case for the A’Na, pleasure is mutual, and if anything, it is one’s lover’s bliss that makes
sexual intercourse truly pleasurable. She does actually weave her choice, inspired by Susanne,
as a neo-platonic argument where two halves find themselves and are at last rejoined through
sexual intercourse. But pleasure comes also from the fact that, by choosing her pleasure with
her lover of choice, Fanchon defies, in one fell swoop, her parents, as well as the stale
Catholic morality that would want her sexually ignorant and a bigot, and that would deny
her body the natural and enriching pleasure that her naturally orgasmic body is meant to give
her.
From this perspective, then, an important paradox lies embedded in the heart of
pornography in the Italian/French continuum, as both a literary and cultural construct,
given that it is presented to the readers as a source of natural pleasure but also as a site of
political resistance and rebellion. This paradox is implicitly outlined in Lynn Hunt's
definition of pornography. She describes the ironically traditional, if not presumably
timeless, quality of pornography as "the explicit depiction of sexual organs and sexual
practices with the aim of arousing sexual feelings"; at the same time, however, she
compellingly argues for the "modernity" of European pornography, especially in the early
modern period, that stems from the fact that such works, "us[ed] the shock of sex to criticize
religious and political authorities”, as we have seen is the goal of Susanne and Fanchon. 37
Consequently, the transgressive nature of pornography is rooted in the desire to mock, to
upend, and in some cases to reshape the mores of the dominant culture. In Foucaldian
fashion, the effort made through pornography to challenge existing authority and to suggest
new paradigms of thought, identity, and behavior is what makes it "modern" in the current
sense of the term. 38
In other words, the pursuit of sexual pleasure for men and women is at once antimodern
as it is natural and thus timeless (and in this sense the anonymous author of the
L’école des filles pays homage to Giulio Romano and Pietro Aretino). But it is also modern
because it is chronologically meaningful and political as it is timely posed against social
hypocrisy. It is also “modern” as it wants to be a new way to relate to life, society, and power.
It is iconoclastic because it wants to define itself against a tradition it does not recognize. The
pursuit of pleasure then becomes immanent in revolt against the transcendental message of
love as sentiment (the message in Goethe’s Young Werther) and as a platonic force, especially
in the Catholic context. The transgression happens through sex; furthermore, it can only
happen through sex in words, and by allowing women to speak for themselves.
It is true that even in L’école des filles the women in the end rail against men of the
church to the bigots on behalf of other men. They are actually excluded from making
meaning for themselves. But mouthpieces that they may be, these women have a great deal
of fun, pleasure and sex, as they service not only the bodies but also the philosophy of men.
They destroy hymens, norms, and merrily transgress, and with each orgasm they shake the
37 Hunt, Lynn, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800. New
York: Zone Books, 1993, 10.
38 See also Russell J. Ganim, “Aretino's Legacy: L'Ecole des filles and the Pornographic Continuum in Early
Modern France,” in Religion, Ethics, and History in the French Long Seventeenth Century, William Brooks and
Rainer Zaiser, eds. Bern & Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007.
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oots of Catholic morality a bit more deeply. The training of the young woman through sex
is thus revolutionary because it undermines society at its very ethical core. The Marquis de
Sade takes this lesson to the extreme and educates both his girls and their mothers in ways
that violently etch onto their bodies the schizophrenic message of the sexual education as the
key to annihilation, and not as “ a portal to pleasure” as well as “a gateway to transcendent
experience.” 39 But the fact remains that Ecole des Filles “presents a rational argument for
changing social attitudes, if not values about sex.” 40
It is from this perspective that we can use French pornography in a way that truly
illuminates the dynamics in a source like the Chipozi zhuan in Ming times (and vice versa).
Clearly A’Na, Jade Scent, or Pan Jinlian, for that matter, are not, as they are often seen,
shadows of the sexually voracious heroines who in the pages of the seventeenth and the
eighteenth century French pornographic works vociferously celebrate their orgasmic body
and condemn the perverse powers of the Catholic Church and of the social hypocrites of
their times. 41 In particular, A’Na’s voice in Chipozi zhuan, as we have seen, is not only
different, but in the end also quite antithetical in terms of (erotic, political and sexual) goals
and strategies to the French ones, and not just because of the obvious linguistic, cultural and
socio-political differences.
The Chinese and the French sources are both framed as didactic texts and are
spoken, in a monologue and dialogue form respectively, from a woman’s voice. In Chipozi
zhuan we find an old woman who has gone through worldly experience and thus speaks with
the authority of age and disillusion. Her location, both at the beginning and at the end of the
tale, in a Buddhist secluded position of non-attachment is challenged by the pleasure that retelling
her story gives her. In Ecole des filles the older cousin appears to be in a position of at
least chronological superiority at the beginning of the dialogue, but just for few years: here
authority is not so much age-wise but gained through sexual experience. Furthermore, by the
end of the novel both cousins become equal, as the younger one is no longer a virgin and she
is able to relate and also somehow surpass her cousin in terms of sexual savvies and expertise.
But the seemingly empowerment that comes from the first person narrative in the Chinese
source is diminished by the fact that we know that the text, in the end, is a dialogue between
a older woman, with no powerful social standing, and a man (the editor who brings the
woman’s words from the realm of the oral and colloquial to that of the written and of the
literary).
It is also true that the subject matter is similar (the sexual education of young
woman), but the moral lessons to be drawn are dramatically different. We should not forget
that in both cultures we are dealing with fictional sources that depict dynamics and fantasies
that would most likely be unknown or shocking to the majority of readers and viewers. Even
with this caveat, the Chinese source is quite socially conservative, as we have seen. Even if the
anonymous author of the Chipozi zhuan brings the discourse of ethics into the bedroom, he
keeps the center of shi (authority/penis, the true phallus!) where it should be, in male hands,
and does not destabilize any established system of power. We could call his work
39 Ganim, “Aretino's Legacy,” 173.
40 Ganim, “Aretino's Legacy,” 170.
41 Norberg, Kathryn, “The Libertine Whore. Prostitution in French Pornography from Margot to Juliette,” in
Hunt, Lynn, ed. The Invention of Pornography, 225.
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whether it was her choice to have her words written down for posterity (and future
generations of readers like ourselves) to enjoy. Still, her story has a good deal to teach us: we
would be the fools not to listen to her tale.
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