Saying All That Can Be Said: The Art of Describing Sex in <i>Jin Ping Mei</i>

Keith McMahon's most recent book proposes a new framework for understanding the significance of explicit sexual content in the Ming novel Jin Ping Mei. He argues that the novel's explicitly sexual passages, many of which are still excised from modern editions of the novel, serve a crucial aesthetic function, and that they are fundamental to the novel's project of “exposing all the affairs in the world” (2). All readers of Jin Ping Mei, McMahon suggests, should grapple with its sexual descriptions, because they emblematize the defiance of social norms and the power of creativity, “taking sex as a vehicle for reading the world” (259).What does it mean to “take sex as a vehicle for reading the world”? McMahon's argument relies on two overlapping interpretive strategies: first, he takes a granular approach to classifying the novel's explicit descriptions, analyzing particular passages and words. He cites liberally from the text, including translations of almost all its explicit descriptions. Second, he offers a broad comparative analysis with other premodern Chinese texts, including erotic manuals that had been in circulation for millennia, pornographic fictional works in classical and vernacular Chinese from the late imperial period, and novels that were influenced by Jin Ping Mei's descriptions.Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are devoted to developing a taxonomy of Jin Ping Mei's rhetoric as operating in the “high erotic” and “graphic” modes. He treats the former in general terms in chapter 3, and in the more specific context of battle as a metaphor for sexual encounters in chapter 4. Chapter 5 describes the range of nonallusive, graphic description in Jin Ping Mei. Across these chapters, McMahon reiterates that all descriptions of sex in the novel are “linguistically performative rather than realistically descriptive” (68) and that even those descriptions that seem most naturalistic should be read as formulaic. These chapters aim to identify how the register of a particular sexual description contributes to the overall narrative. For example, he observes that the high erotic mode is never used in Ximen Qing's affairs with servants but that it is used in an exaggerated way in descriptions of courtesans, thereby enhancing “the brothel's theatricality” (94). Chapter 6 proposes a typology for the various female sex partners of Ximen Qing, reducing them to literary types; McMahon might have considered, instead, how their distinctiveness contributes to their agency.Chapters 2, 7, and 8 compare the treatment of sex in Jin Ping Mei with other sexually explicit texts from premodern China. Chapter 2 offers a composite introduction to the instructional manuals known as “arts of the bedchamber” (fangzhong shu), important in this context for the way that tradition “addresses the problem of excess by creating an entire discourse about non-excessive sex” (64). Despite their divergences in both vocabulary and style, McMahon identifies four instructive commonalities between those manuals and Jin Ping Mei: an emphasis on women's formidability, the description of sex as a battle, the idea of one man engaging with multiple women, and an openness in describing sex. Chapter 7 compares Jin Ping Mei with other explicit Ming and Qing fiction, concluding that other pornographic works from this period are relatively more focused on “entertainment, shock, and titillation” (203). Jin Ping Mei's “greater length and linguistic complexity,” McMahon argues, put it “in a separate category of sexually explicit literature of the late Ming” (204). This comparative approach allows McMahon to identify what Jin Ping Mei does not say about sex—for example, it does not depict Ximen Qing sleeping with all his wives at once or write about one named sexual position after another “without adding more elements of tension and thematic significance” (211). That distinction tells us something about Jin Ping Mei's politics, which never depicts Ximen Qing’s polygamous household as a “pornographic utopia” (217); instead, it insistently depicts women as active negotiators with their own interests. Chapter 8 considers Jin Ping Mei's influence, discussing a pair of “outlandish” (241) eighteenth-century novels that are “blatantly and obsessively pornographic yet make it seems as if the pornography takes place somewhere else” (241–42) as well as the more moderate Shenlou zhi (Mirage, 1804), which contains what McMahon describes as “a form of hedonistic polygamy” (242) intended to correct the excesses of Jin Ping Mei. Taken together, these chapters offer a comprehensive and convincing assessment of the significance of the sex in Jin Ping Mei in the context of late imperial Chinese culture.Saying All That Can Be Said is an excellent introduction to how to think cross-culturally and transhistorically about the question of literary pornography. In chapter 1, McMahon makes a case for calling Jin Ping Mei “pornographic” rather than “erotic,” because it features “obsessive repetition” (13) of explicit descriptions of sexual acts that “violate social norms” (12), because it relates to “social and political criticism” (15), and because it functions as “a vehicle of provocation” (17). These final two qualities get at what lends pornography its social power, even across centuries and through translation. Ultimately, however, Saying All That Can Be Said misses the opportunity to clarify the implications of its argument as pertains to the politics—and gender politics—of Jin Ping Mei's pornography, and how those politics have changed from the Ming moment of the novel's creation to its present global existence in many editions and translations. McMahon engages early on with Naifei Ding's feminist critique of Jin Ping Mei as a “deeply misogynist” text that offers pleasure without consequences to presumed male readers (quoted on p. 6) from the Ming to the present. McMahon suggests that “it is unwieldy to contain [the dissolute voice] entirely under the umbrella of misogyny or dominant male perspective” (7), and he borrows Ding's terms “leaks and letups” to suggest that the novel's “shifting perspective” (9) subverts easy summary of its sexual politics. The chapters frequently highlight differences in the way that sex is described between particular characters, most of them female, but nowhere are the implications developed in a substantial way.Saying All That Can Be Said showcases McMahon's erudition and considerable expertise across a wide array of Ming-Qing fiction. Attentive to minute textual details and broadly conversant with related texts, this is a balanced study that offers new perspectives to specialists while remaining accessible to pornography scholars of other cultural contexts.