Jinpingmei In The Narratological Perspective

Jinpingmei is highly susceptible to controversy in the history of reading because of its large amount of description of sex. Voices in defense of it, nonetheless, have never ceased since its appearance. Along with changes in ideological circumstances and progression in ideas about novels, its importance and unusualness has been noticed more and more by the researchers. Jinpingmei not only has an apparent inheritance of narrative tradition, but also is a turning point in the history of Chinese novels due to its unusual innovation from extraordinary insights and representation power. This evaluation has already become something like a consensus in the current community of researchers of Chinese novels. Based upon this consensus, through narrative mechanism and its relation with discourse theme, the present paper explores Jinpingmei’s narrative characteristics and the significance of its innovation. This significance amounts to nationalized narrative practice, and, moreover, possible inspiration and enrichment for narrative theories in general.This paper comprises four sections, the first of which is the introduction. It introduces the significance of a research on Jinpingmei from the perspective of narratology briefly, provides a general review of the current study upon the object novel, and also discusses issues of orientation and methodology. Having provided a necessary demarcation for the notion of voice of the novelist, Chapter1concentrates on analysis of the voice of the novelist in Jinpingmei. The paper argues that the voice of the novelist of Jinpingmei, who is not present in the story itself, can still be distinguishable in the voice of the reader, because discourse means communication. Secondly, the great influence of the Confucian philosophy of mind upon the discourses of Jinpingmei reflects the novelist’s special reaction to social thoughts. The novelist belonged to the age of the late Ming Dynasty. It cannot be the case that he knew nothing about that branch of Confucian philosophy. Third, since discourse designing at the chapter level cannot be attributed to the absent novelist or the narrator, Jinpingmei’s style of irony indicates its novelist’s voice. Chapter2first presents an analysis of theories of narrative perspective. Based upon this analysis, it characterizes the special narrative perspective of Jinpingmei, and then explains how this perspective forms in the novel. It argues that "representation", one of the two basic narrative modes,"regenerates" much more in the novel in question than in the traditional ones. Secondly, it is pointed out that Jinpingmei has a property of self-aware visionalization in consciousness and discourses. Next, the chapter analyzes the types and functions of the narrative perspective of Jinpingmei. It is argued that in comparison with early chapter-structured novels, the novel in question here features a masterful and multiple application of narrative perspective, and, in particular, its adequate application of figure perspectives greatly enhances narrative effects. In Chapter3of the present paper, space theories and spatial criticisms in narratology is first introduced and explained, and then the chapter concentrates on the spatiality of Jinpingmei and the main narrative spaces in the novel. This chapter points out that the novel innovates in the narrative technique of broad-range, multiple-angle and holistic representation of real occurrences, a type of representation making use of various sorts of spaces and buildings. The narrative mechanism of Jinpingmei obviously features a spatialized narration.