I Lie Therefore I Am

Lisa Zunshine I LIE THEREFORE I AM (Written for Approaches to Teaching The Plum in the Golden Vase, edited by Andrew Schonebaum [New York, MLA]; under review; comments welcome) Lying is fundamental to the construction of fictional consciousness. Some genres, such as picaresque novels, detective stories, and comedies of manners, are built around characters intentionally deceiving each other. Others, such as eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury psychological novels, thrive on their protagonists’ self-deception. Yet others, such as postmodernist metafiction, have some characters deceive us as to the ontological status of other characters, while also leaving open the possibility that they themselves may be figments of others’ imagination. As a cognitive literary critic, I think of lying in the context of our “mindreading” ability, aka our “theory of mind,” that is, our evolved cognitive predisposition to perceive our own and other people’s observable behavior as caused by mental states, such as thoughts, feelings, desires, and intentions. I have argued elsewhere that fiction exploits our readiness to intuit mental states behind behavior: we make sense of what we read by attributing thoughts and feelings to characters, narrators, authors, and (implied) readers.1 Different genres foreground different aspects of mindreading, speeding up and slowing down the process, encouraging wrong attributions of mental states, and resolving (or refusing to resolve) ambiguous social situations by revealing their participants’ feelings. Given the productive instability surrounding mindreading in fiction, it’s not surprising 1 that lying—as a deliberate or an unwitting misrepresentation of one’s true intentions— remains a staple of fictional subjectivity. If we want to use a cognitive-literary perspective to take a closer look at what lying can do for a writer in a particular genre (in addition, that is, to merely reflecting and magnifying our real-life mindreading uncertainties), we would do well to turn to an early paradigm-setting specimen of that genre. The anonymous The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chin P’ing Mei 金瓶梅) fits this description well. Written in the last decades of the sixteenth century, it is considered “the first Chinese novel that was wholly the creation of one author and had no antecedent in the oral tradition” (Schonebaum 63). It tells the story of an upwardly mobile merchant Hsi-men Ch’ing and his six wives and concubines, whose lives are steeped in “deception, bribery, blackmail, profligacy, flamboyant sex, and even murder” (Link n.p.). Among those familial pastimes, lying occupies a pride of place. Every couple of chapters, a new intrigue blossoms, often starting with a sexual transgression and snowballing as characters keep eavesdropping on each other and framing each other. Let us consider one such episode in some detail and then see what we gain by viewing it through a cognitive lens. Golden Lotus Drives a Servant to Suicide In chapter 25, when Hsi-men Ch’ing’s purchasing agent, Lai-wang, comes back from a business trip, he learns from Hsi-men Ch’ing’s concubine, Sun Hsüeh-o, that while he was away, Hsi-men Ch’ing started an affair with his wife, Sung Hui-lien. Laiwang confronts his wife, but she claims that her enemies “made up this tale” (2:87), 2 which seems to placate him. (It may help that by now he has started his own affair with Sun Hsüeh-o.) Another of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s retainers, Kan Lai-hsing, who has a grudge against Lai-wang, overhears Lai-wang, in his cups, railing angrily against Hsi-men Ch’ing and one of his wives, P’an Chin-lien, who (as Lai-wang has been told by Sun Hsüeh-o) has provided cover for the affair between Sung Hui-lien and Hsi-men Ch’ing. Lai-hsing goes to P’an Chin-lien, tells her (falsely) that Lai-wang tried to pick a fight with him, and gives her an exaggerated account of Lai-wang’s threats. The incensed P’an Chin-lien reports it to Hsi-men Ch’ing. Hsi-men Ch’ing questions Sung Hui-lien, but she swears that Lai-wang “never said any such thing,” and that Lai-hsing has “made up this story out of whole cloth” (2: 96). Hsi-men Ch’ing believes her and promises to send her husband off on another long-term business trip. Sung Hui-lien and Hsi-men Ch’ing then agree on a lie that she will tell when others notice a new gift that Hsi-men Ch’ing is about to give her. When P’an Chin-lien learns that, instead of punishing Lai-wang, Hsi-men Ch’ing plans to trust him with another prestigious errand, she convinces him that Sung Hui-lien lied to him about her husband’s intentions and that, sooner or later, Lai-wang will take revenge on his master. Hsi-men Ch’ing decides to drive Lai-wang away. He frames him and has him imprisoned. What follows is a long series of lies aimed at making Sung Huilien believe that her husband is doing fine, when, in fact, he is being severely beaten in jail. Sung Hui-lien eventually learns the truth and kills herself. To avoid an official investigation of her death, Hsi-men Ch’ing bribes the court magistrate and concocts a 3 story of Sung Hui-lien being put in charge of the household’s silver utensils and hanging herself in fear of retribution when a cup goes missing. What are we to make of this swarm of lies? We can view them as integral to the author’s larger project of critiquing the corruption of the contemporary imperial court. For, while the story “is set during the reign of Emperor Huizong of Song (1101–1126 CE),” as a political allegory it “points clearly to contemporary Ming rulers as well” (Link n.p.). Or, we can consider the characters’ eager intriguing as a warped expression of “competing claims of individual feeling and the constraints of conventional morality” (Scott 266). Or, along with the seventeenth-century commentator, Chang Chu-p’o, we can appreciate the elaborate architectonics of the 3000-page novel, in which every little detail becomes a “structural device” (204) used by the author “to accomplish his aims without leaving a trace” (206). For instance, the “author needs Sung Hui-lien . . . in order to bring out as completely as possible the viciousness of P’an Chin-lien,” for, it is P’an Chin-lien’s “double-tongued troublemaking between Sun Hsüeh-o and Sung Hui-lien” that precipitates both Lai-wangs “narrow escape from death and the needless suicide of Sung Hui-lien” (211). Embedded Mental States in Fiction To see how a cognitive perspective may complement these insights, consider the role of deception in generating complex embedments of mental states. As I have argued elsewhere, fiction as we know it today, as well as some literary nonfiction, constantly embed mental states on at least the third level (i.e., a mental state within a mental state 4 within yet another mental state). This is in direct contrast both to expository nonfiction— which may contain complex embedments now and then, but can also wholly subsist on just the first and second level—and to our routine social interactions. For, occasional drama and intrigue notwithstanding (e.g., “I don’t want him to know that I forgot his birthday; I wonder if she knows what they really have in mind for her), thinking about thinking about thinking (third-level embedment) “occurs in interpersonal cognition in real life less frequently” than, for instance, thinking about thinking (second-level embedment). The former, as cognitive psychologist Patricia Miller puts it, “has a lower ecological plausibility” (622). In fiction, we make sense of what we read by processing a steady stream of thirdand fourth-level embedments, associated with characters, narrators, (implied) authors, and (implied) readers, in a vast variety of combinations.2 For instance, in Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢), while visiting her aunt, Mrs. Xue, Lin Dai-yu scolds a maid who brings her a hand-warmer, because she imagines that someone may think that she thinks that her hosts are not taking good care of her. As she explains it to the surprised Mrs. Xue: ‘You don’t understand, Aunt . . . It doesn't matter here, with you; but some people might be deeply offended at the sight of one of my maids rushing in with a handwarmer. It’s though I thought my hosts couldn’t supply one themselves if I needed it. Instead of saying how thoughtful the maid was, they would put it down to my arrogance and lack of breeding.’ (193)「姨媽不知道。幸虧是姨媽這裏，倘或在 5 別人家，人家豈不惱﹖好說就看得人家連個手爐也沒有，巴巴的從家裏送個來。不說丫頭 們太小心過餘，還只當我素日是這等輕狂慣了呢。」 In Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary” (“狂人日記”), when the protagonist laughs uproariously at the doctor’s suggestion that he should rest quietly for a couple of days and both the doctor and the protagonist’s brother turn pale, the protagonist thinks that they are “awed” by his “courage and integrity” (19) (“老頭子和大哥，都失了色，被我 這勇氣正氣鎮壓住了”). That is, he thinks that they know that he has seen through their plot to fatten him up and eat him. The reader knows, however, that the protagonist doesn't realize that the reason that the two men turn pale is that they think that his laughter is a sure sign of his insanity. Or, to put it differently, the (implied) author wants the readers to realize that the mad protagonist misinterprets the body language of his visitors.3 Of course, these are my formulations, but if you try to come up with one of your own, you may discover that, if you want to capture the complexity of the situation conjured up by Lu Xun, simpler descriptions of mental functioning, such as, “they think that he is insane” or “we know that he doesn’t realize why they turn pale,” won’t do. Even worse, they will misrepresent what’s going on, until you find a way to connect them, as in, “we know that he doesn’t realize that they think that he is insane.” It seems, in other words, that, however you choose to phrase it, you will need to recursively embed mental states on at least the third level. While we do not explicitly articulate them to ourselves when we read, something in us must keep track of those complex intentionalities, because, otherwise, we would miss the ironic effect of this scene. 6 Complex embedments can be explicitly spelled out (as in the example from Dream, above) or implied (as in “A Madman’s Diary”), or they can be a combination of the two. One finds them as far back as in The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BC), The Iliad, and The Odyssey (c. 800 BC), although they are nowhere as frequent in those texts as they would come to be later (e.g., in the eleventh-century Japanese novel, the sixteenthcentury Chinese novel, the eighteenth-century English novel, or in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century memoirs concerned with imagination and consciousness, such as Wordsworth’s Prelude or Nabokov’s Speak, Memory). Moreover, it appears that the further back one goes in time, the likelier it is that third-level embedments in fiction are created chiefly by portraying characters who intentionally deceive other characters. (For instance, in Gilgamesh, Ea wants dwellers of Shuruppak to think that they are beloved by a god and hence should expect abundance to rain on them, when, in fact, they are about to be wiped out by a flood [85]. On another occasion, Gilgamesh wants Utnapishtim to think that he has been awake for six days and seven nights—when, in fact, he has slept for a week—and in response, he is being shown seven loaves of bread that Utnapishtim’s wife baked for each day that Gilgamesh slept, for they had expected that he would lie to them, that is, they had known that he would want to make them believe that he has not slept at all. [92]) In contrast, in more recent works, complex embedment is generated by a much wider variety of representational means, which include deception, but are not limited to it. Given that The Plum in the Golden Vase marks an important threshold in Chinese literary history, its pattern of complex embedment may deserve special attention. Later in this essay, I will consider several different strategies used by its anonymous author to 7 embed mental states on a high level, but, at this point, I will focus specifically on deception. To see how it generates complex embedment, let’s take another look at the sad story of Lai-wang and his wife. When Lai-wang first confronts Sung Hui-lien about her affair with their employer, she wants him to believe that her enemies wanted him to think that she has been unfaithful (“some backbiting . . . person . . . must have put you up to abusing your old lady” [87].) Later, Lai-hsing wants P’an Chin-lien to think that Lai-wang intends to kill her, and then P’an Chin-lien, in her turn, wants Hsi-men Ch’ing to think that Laiwang is keen on revenge. Then, when Lai-wang is in jail, Hsi-men Ch’ing doesn’t want Sung Hui-lien to know that he intends to force him to run away by making his life unbearable. Finally, after Sung Hui-lien kills herself, Hsi-men Ch’ing wants the magistrates to think that the young woman was afraid of being punished for misplacing a silver cup. Note that although I speak of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s wanting to shape the magistrates’ thinking about the reason a young woman in his household would want to kill herself, it falls to the reader to thus reconstruct those and other mental states. The novel itself offers almost no explicit references to characters’ thoughts and feelings. Instead, as Tina Lu observes, in Chin P’ing Mei, “bodies are depicted from the outside, and there is very little internal monologue.” What we have, instead, are implied embedments. That is, characters’ interiority emerges from the “matrix of negotiation, of motivation perceived through the prism of other peoples’ motivations” (Lu, “Interiority,” this volume).4 I listed above only a few of such embedments. There are many more, both in Sung Hui-lien’s story and elsewhere in the text. At every turn of the plot, another one 8 springs to life. To make sense of what is going on, readers have to constantly keep in mind what one character wants another character to think about his/her or someone else’s intentions. Once we notice this pattern, we can speak of various ways in which it is put to use by the novel. We can say, along with the other scholars quoted earlier, that it serves to present Hsi-men Ch’ing’s household as rotten to the core and thus deserving an awful retribution that awaits them; that it critiques the corruption of contemporary rulers; and that it shows what twisted forms individual initiative can assume when (as in the case of women in the patriarchy) it has no better outlet than selfish intriguing. We would do well, however, even as we commit to any of those interpretations, to acknowledge the role of the “cognitive” factor in structuring our response to the story. For, while lying in fiction does not always call for moral condemnation,5 it does open the door to complex embedment of mental states and, with it, to a very pointed and energetic engagement with readers’ theory of mind. Cognition and History To speak of deception as a long-traveled road to complex embedment begs the larger question of why embedded mental states have become so integral to representation of fictional consciousness. To answer this question is to consider an interplay of cognitive and historical factors. On the one hand, given the centrality of mindreading and misreading to human communication, it may not be not terribly surprising that writers 9 would intensify this aspect of human sociality to render their narratives more engaging. As Patrick Colm Hogan puts it, Successful authors are unusually proficient at simulating and communicating simulations. Such simulation and communication are largely unself-conscious processes, a matter of implicitly understanding patterns in human relations and conveying that implicit understanding representationally, which is to say, through the depiction of situations that manifest the patterns—usually in a heightened or more salient form than we would encounter them in ordinary life (26). On the other hand, while the “ordinary life” of every human society may depend on people’s capacity to embed their own and other people’s mental states, not every society may openly acknowledge this dependence and foreground it in its stories. For instance, in a number of Melanesian cultures, it is considered unacceptable to talk about people’s intentions. This has even led some ethnographers to assume that in those cultures “it is impossible or at least extremely difficult to know what other people think or feel” (Robbins and Rumsey 408). A closer look reveals, however, that the taboo on attributing intention reflects the local notion of personal integrity and inviolability, according to which the loss of ability to keep one’s feelings hidden (as, for instance, during confession, after conversion to Protestant Christianity) is considered shameful. As Webb Keane explains 10 It is not that inner thoughts are inherently unknowable but that they ought to be unspeakable, or at least, it matters greatly who gets to speak these thoughts . . . . [Thus it] is not the case that [the Melanesians] have no capacity to read minds or invent fictions: rather, these capacities serve ethical thought, leading to emphatic denial of something that they are in fact doing. . . . To reiterate, if Theory of Mind and intention-seeking are common to all humans, how these get played down or emphasized can contribute to quite divergent ethical worlds. Elaborated in some communities, suppressed in others, these cognitive capacities appear as both sources of difficulties in their own right and affordances for ethical work. (127, 131) I remember once giving a talk about embedded mental states in Dream of the Red Chamber at the China Cognitive Poetics Conference at Guandong University of Foreign Studies in Guangzhou, after which an audience member asked me the following question. Is it possible, she wondered, that Chinese literature is more invested in representation of complex embedments than are other national literatures because people in China are “obsessed” with each other’s mental states. At the time I disagreed with her. I was convinced that no culture is exempt from this obsession, and that the presence of works of fiction characterized by intensified mindreading patterns is only one of several cultural forms that this obsession may take. Today, however, I am more open to her argument. While I would disagree with any grand pronouncement about what kind of fictional narratives can or cannot thrive in a community in which capacities for mindreading are “played down,” I think we can safely assume that communities in which mindreading 11 capacities are “emphasized” offer their members more contexts for explicitly representing various shades and hues of intentionality. To this broadly-conceived set of historical circumstances congenial to sustained representation of embedded mental states in fiction, we can add others, more specific. As Haiyan Lee has argued, “stranger sociality, cosmopolitanism, and social mobility,” which structure “modern commercial societies,” encourage exercise of theory of mind, removing from it the “tinge of opprobrium” that may be attached to it in societies characterized by “kinship sociality that presumes relatively stable identity and . . . effortlessly [embodied] socially shared values” (“Measuring”).6 The availability of the vernacular literary language and advanced means of textual reproduction may further contribute to generic diversification and dissemination of imaginative narratives shot through with mindreading opportunities. A critical inquiry into complex embedment generated by lies is thus not just a cognitive but also a historicist project.7 Fictional characters deceived each other for millennia—witness Cao Pi’s “Scholar T’an” (“談生”), dated to the late second-early third century, and Niu Seng-ju’s “Scholar Ts’ui” (“崔書生”), from the early ninth century8— but not on a scale comparable to what we find in The Plum in the Golden Vase. In recognizing the steady stream of lies that runs through this novel as a cognitive-literary innovation, we open a conversation about historical circumstances (both long-term and immediate) that made this form of experimentation with our daily mind-reading patterns acceptable and possible. A Mindreading Profile of Chin P’ing Mei 12 Lest we think that lying is the only pathway to complex embedment in The Plum, let us consider a few others, starting with concern about one’s dignity. As Lee has shown, the notion of “face” is in and of itself an effective generator of complex embedment in fiction (“Response”) because it conjures the perspective of a character thinking about how he/she would be perceived by an imagined observer. In The Plum, given Hsi-men Ch’ing’s social ambitions, the worry about face is ever-present. Thus, during an earlier debacle in Chapter 12, when P’an Chin-lien first fools around with a page boy and then claims that it never happened and that her enemies cooked up the whole story, her loyal servant, P’ang Ch’un-mei, exploits Hsi-men Ch’ing’s fear of losing face with his neighbors if he punishes P’an Chin-lien on false premises. As Ch’un-mei puts it, ‘This is all something fabricated by someone who is jealous of Mother and me. Father, you ought to think what you’re doing, or you’ll only make an ugly reputation for yourself, which won’t sound any too good when it gets abroad.’ (1:237) (‘這個都是人氣不憤俺娘兒們，做作出這樣事來。爹，你也要個主 張，好把醜名兒頂在頭上，傳出外邊去好聽?’) Ch’un-mei wants Hsi-men Ch’ing to imagine what other people will think when they find out about his rash behavior.9 Her manipulative invocation of those judgmental others bucks up a lie—for, in the same breath, she also wants Hsi-men Ch’ing to believe that other wives want to bring P’an Chin-lien down. 13 Does a lie gain in persuasiveness when thus paired with a reminder of one’s social vulnerability (i.e., the dependence on other people’s opinions)? It seems to be so, given how often appeals to face are adjacent to lies in The Plum. For instance, when, in chapter 25, P’an Chin-lien wants Hsi-men Ch’ing to believe that Lai-wang considers him his enemy, she makes Hsi-men Ch’ing worry about what other people will think about him. Thus she refers to “allegations” that Lai-wang makes “in front of people” and assures him that “such allegations would not redound to [Hsi-men Ch’ing’s] credit” (2:95). Similarly, when P’an Chin-lien wants Hsi-men Ch’ing to think that Sung Hui-lien conceals from Hsi-men Ch’ing the true extent of the enmity that Lai-wang bears him (“Whatever that woman has had to say for some time now has only been spoken on behalf of that slave of yours”), she, once again, brings in public opinion. If Lai-wang defrauds Hsi-men Ch’ing of his money (something that, P’an Chin-lien implies, he surely intends to do), Hsi-men Ch’ing will be too embarrassed to “accuse him of anything” (2:99), because everybody will have known that he has stolen Lai-wang’s wife. And, again, when Lai-wang is already in jail, tortured for a crime he didn't commit, and P’an Chin-lien learns that Hsi-men Ch’ing is writing a note to the judge asking for his release, she lobbies for “[polishing] off this slave once and for all,” by planting an image of jeering neighbors in Hsi-men Ch’ing’s mind. Lai-wang, she claims, shall always hold a grudge against his master, even if Hsi-men Ch’ing will go as far as marrying him to someone else, to make up for having taken Sung Hui-lien from him. For instance, if Lai-wang comes to “report something” to Hsi-men Ch’ing and sees him together with Sung Hui-lien, wouldn’t he get “angry”? And would Sung Hui-lien then 14 have “to stand up” to greet her ex-husband? Wouldn’t that be embarrassing for Hsi-men Ch’ing? As P’an Chin-lien puts it: Just to start out with, this alone wouldn’t look right. If it got around, not only would your neighbors and relatives laugh at you, but even the members of your own household, high and low, would not be able to take you seriously. (2:111). ( 先不先只這個就不雅相，傳出去休說六鄰親戚笑話，只家中⼤⼩，把你也不 著在意裡。) Strategic appeals to face constitute just one aspect of psychological manipulation that characters practice on each other. When Lai-wang is finally driven away, just as P’an Chin-lien hoped he would be, she goes between Sun Hsüeh-o and Sung Hui-lien, reporting lies that can’t fail to stir up a “sense of grievance and desire for revenge.” First, she wants Sun Hsüeh-o to think that Sung Hui-lien knows that Sun Hsüeh-o told Laiwang about Sung Hui-lien’s affair with Hsi-men Ch’ing (which is not true) and that she blames her for making Hsi-men Ch’ing angry and for making him want to get rid of Laiwang. Then she goes to Sung Hui-lien. Her she wants to believe that people in the compound think that she has never cared about her husband. So she reports to her— falsely—that Sun Hsüeh-o tells everyone that Sung Hui-lien is an “old hand at inveigling” her masters “into adultery” and that the tears that she sheds about her husband “are only crocodile tears” (1:121). These lies precipitate an ugly standoff between Sung Hui-lien and Sun Hsüeh-o, which pushes Sung Hui-lien over the brink and leads her to commit her second, and this time successful, suicide attempt. 15 Yet another way in which The Plum generates complex embedment is by its frequent reference to songs and poems, each of which presupposes an elaborate give and take between the implied author and his audience. Were we to spell it out (which we don’t do, of course, for it happens below the level of our conscious awareness), we could say that the author expects that his readers would appreciate his intention of drawing their attention to this or that aspect of a given situation. For instance, when Sung Hui-lien wants to convince Hsi-men Ch’ing that her husband would never curse and threaten Hsimen Ch’ing behind his back, she asserts that, were Lai-wang to do such a thing, he would effectively be biting the hand that feeds him, and he is not that stupid. As she puts it, If he should: Live off King Chou’s largesse, And yet call King Chou a villain, on whom could he depend to make a living? (2:96) Sung Hui-lien’s mention of King Chou comes close on the heels of an earlier reference to the ancient Book of Documents (Shu-ching, 書經). That reference, according to the endnote provided by The Plum’s translator, David Tod Roy, tacitly likens Hsi-men Ch’ing to King Chou, the “evil last ruler” of the Shang dynasty (2:494). So, here, while Sung Hui-lien seems to want to emphasize the implausibility of her husband’s badmouthing Hsi-men Ch’ing, she accomplishes quite the opposite with her quote: she badmouths him herself. For, as Roy explains, the “unmistakable implication” of what she says, “is that Hsi-men Ch’ing himself is an evil last ruler” (2:494).10 16 That neither Sung Hui-lien nor Hsi-men Ch’ing are aware of this implication makes their mutually pleasing exchange profoundly ironic. The implied author wants the implied reader to know he considers Hsi-men Ch’ing evil, but he also wants us to know that Hsi-men Ch’ing doesn’t realize that the argument that he apparently finds convincing is a classical reference that condemns him. Nor is he aware of the grave innuendo of being likened to the last ruler—something than the implied author wants the implied reader to keep in mind as we follow the household’s rejoicing at the birth of Hsi-men Ch’ing’s son, Kuan-ko. Finally, we know that Sung Hui-lien doesn’t know, when she unwittingly calls her lover a villain, that he is about to behave like one toward her and her husband—another nuance in the ongoing give and take between the implied author and the implied reader. Scholars of Chin P’ing Mei have long been aware of some “serious intention” behind the text. Andrew Plaks cites the earliest critical responses to the novel, which contain such observations as, “the author definitely has his own intentions” and “there is an object to [the text’s] ironic stabs” (132). Plaks himself discusses at length “the possibility of hidden intentions” (128) implied by the author’s use of “borrowed material,” such as songs and poems, as well as the role that “frequent interpolations of authorial asides” play “to periodically remind “the reader of the presence of the narrator somewhere between himself and the story” (123). One insight that the cognitive perspective adds to this ongoing conversation, is that the reader’s awareness of the narrator/implied author’s intention (which must vary quite widely) depends on that reader’s processing of mental states embedded within each other on at least the third level. 17 Thus, one way to describe a “mindreading profile” of Chin P’ing Mei is to say that it combines deception, psychological manipulation of one character by another, and “ironic stabs” (the full meaning of which is often available to the implied reader but not to the characters themselves), to keep the reader steadily embedding mental states on a high level. Later these methods will be amplified by Wu Ching-Tzu’s The Scholars (儒林 外史) and Cao’s Dream of the Red Chamber. The latter, in particular, will drastically expand the novel’s repertoire of strategies for complex embedment by afflicting its male protagonist with the “lust of the mind” (意淫), that is, with a passionate need to understand and share the emotions of girls11 —something that’s hard to imagine in the universe of Hsi-men Ch’ing. Still, as we think of Chin P’ing Mei’s “sophisticated use of narrative rhetoric,” which makes it “a model of the literati novel genre maturing in the sixteenth century” (Plaks 121), we acknowledge its unprecedentedly innovative appeal to the late Ming dynasty readers’ theory of mind. Options for Teaching Approaching The Plum in the Golden Vase from a cognitive perspective opens it up for inclusion in a relatively wide spectrum of courses, albeit not in its entirety. Having taught the first volume of David Hawkes’s translation of Dream of the Red Chamber in the “Introduction to Literature” seminar for sophomores at my university’s English Department, I can easily imagine including instead a lengthy excerpt from The Plum, for instance, chapters 22-26 (just under one hundred pages), which tell the story of P’an 18 Chin-lien’s driving Sung Hui-lien to suicide. The same selection can be integrated into a course on the history of the novel, as well as into a variety of special-topic courses, such as (to still draw on my own teaching stock), “Social Minds in Fiction” and “Lying Bodies: Pretense, Performance, and the Novel.” Given the rapid growth of the field of cognitive literary studies over the last decade,12 seminars on critical theory and narrative theory increasingly feature units on cognitive approaches. Particularly if the instructor has comparativist inclinations and does not want to limit herself to just one national literary tradition, chapters 22-26 of The Plum can be used as a focal point of exploration of complex embedment in literature. One option would be to pair it with other texts that similarly foreground both deception and authorial intention, for instance a sixteenth-century picaresque novel, such as Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) or Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599-1604). Another option would be to follow it up with texts illustrating the evolution of lying in literature (i.e., from deception to self-deception and on to unreliable narration). On the whole, a cognitive take on The Plum in the Golden Vase contributes to an ongoing project of situating this novel in the context of the millennia-long experimentation with representation of fictional consciousness. Works Cited: 19 Anonymous. The Epic of Gilgamesh. Translated and Edited by Benjamin R. Foster. New York: Norton, 2001. Print. Anonymous. The Plum in the Golden Vase, or, Chin P’ing Mei. Volume Two: The Rival. Translated by David Tod Roy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. Print. http://www.guoxue123.com/xiaosuo/jd/jpmch/025.htm Cao Xueqin. The Story of the Stone. Volume 1, “The Golden Days.” Transl. David Hawkes. London: Penguin, 1973. Print. Chang Chu-p’o. “How to Read the Chin P’ing Mei.” Translated and Annotated by David T. Roy; Additional Annotation by David L. Rolston. How To Read the Chinese Novel. Ed. David L. Rolston. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. 202-243. Print. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Sexual Identities. New York: Oxford UP, 2017. Keane, Webb. Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016. Print. 20 Link, Perry. “The Wonderfully Elusive Chinese Novel.” New York Review of Books April 23, 2015. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/04/23/wonderfully-elusive-chinesenovel/ Accessed March 9, 2018. Lee, Haiyan. “Response to the Panel on Cognitive Approaches to Chinese Literature,” MLA, New York, January 2018. -----. “Measuring the Stomach of a Gentleman with the Heart-Mind of a Pipsqueak: On the Ubiquity and Utility of Theory of Mind in Literature, Mostly.” MLA 2018, New York City. -----. The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Lu Xun. “A Madman’s Diary.” Transl. by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang. The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature. Ed. Yunte Huang. New York: Norton, 2016. 15-26. Print. Miller, Patricia H., Frank S. Kessel and John H. Flavell. “Thinking about People Thinking about People Thinking about...: A Study of Social Cognitive Development Child Development.” Child Development 41.3 (September 1970): 613-623. DOI: 10.2307/1127211 21 Plaks, Andrew H. The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Print. Robbins, Joel and Alan Rumsey. “Introduction: Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology and the Opacity of Other Minds.” Anthropological Quarterly 81.2 (2008): 407-20. Print. Schonebaum, Andrew. “Introduction.” Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone (Dream of the Red Chamber). Ed. Andrew Schonebaum and Tina Lu. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2012. 59-69. Print. Scott, Mary. “The Story of the Stone and Its Antecedents.” Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone (Dream of the Red Chamber). Ed. Andrew Schonebaum and Tina Lu. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2012. 258-73. Print. Slingerland, Edward. “Body and mind in early China: An integrated humanities-science approach.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81.1 (March 2013): 1- 50. Print. -----. “Cognitive Science and Religious Thought: The Case of Psychological Interiority in the Analects,” in Mental Culture: Towards a Cognitive Science of Religion. Ed. Dimitris Xygalatas and Lee McCorkle. London: Acumen Publishing, Religion, Cognition and Culture Series, 2013. 197-212. Print. 22 Whalen, D. H., Lisa Zunshine, and Michael Holquist, “Increases in Perspective Embedding Increase Reading Time Even with Typical Text Presentation: Implications for the Reading of Literature.” Frontiers in Psychology (November 2015). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01778. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006. Print. -----. “From the Social to the Literary: Approaching Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone (Honglou meng 紅樓夢) from a Cognitive Perspective.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. Ed. Lisa Zunshine. New York: Oxford UP, 2015. 176-96. Print. -----. “Think What You’re Doing, Or You’ll Only Make an Ugly Reputation for Yourself”: Chin P’ing Mei (金瓶梅), Lying, and Literary History. Cognitive Poetics 认知 诗学 (December 2017): 44-62. Print. -----. “Theory of Mind, Children’s Literature, History.” Narrative, forthcoming. Print. -----. “Theory of Mind as a Pedagogical Tool.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 16.1 (2014): 89-109. Print. 23 -----. “Introduction to Cognitive Literary Studies.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. Ed. Lisa Zunshine. New York: Oxford UP, 2015. 1-9. Print. Contributor’s Note: Lisa Zunshine is Bush-Holbrook professor of English at the University of Kentucky, a former Guggenheim fellow (2007), and author and editor of eleven books, including Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative (2008), Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us About Popular Culture (2012), and The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (2015). She serves on the Board of Editors of 认知诗学 (http://www.cognitive-poetics.com/cn) 1 See Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction, “From the Social to the Literary.” 2 Zunshine, “The Commotion”; Whalen et al 2015. 3 See Zunshine, “Think What You’re Doing.” 4 For a discussion of psychological interiority in classical Chinese texts, such as the Analects of Confucius, see Slingerland. 5 In fact, we can be made to feel sympathetic toward the liar. For instance, Utnapishtim does not judge Gilgamesh for attempting to deceive him: he sees that behavior as only too human. As he puts it to his wife, “Since the human race is duplicitous, he’ll endeavor to dupe you” (92). 6 See also Lee, The Stranger. 7 See Zunshine, “Theory of Mind, Children’s Literature, History.” 24 8 See Zunshine, “Think What You’re Doing.” 9 See Zunshine, “Think What You’re Doing.” 10 See also Plaks, 163-4. 11 See Zunshine, “From the Social.” 12 See Zunshine, “Introduction,” 1. 25