The Carnal Prayer Mat

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What first attracted me to Li Yu was his love of comic invention. "Broadly speaking," he once wrote to a friend, "everything I have ever written was intended to make people laugh." He was never content, as other writers were, to make minor variations upon the standard literary themes. Instead he submitted those themes to a drastic overhaul and created a new comedy of his own, claiming all the while that his version of reality was the true one and that everybody else was deluded. He thus belongs to that rare breed of comic writer-rare in any culture-who discovers or invents the terms of his own reality. [1]

Let me give two obvious examples, both of them discoveries rather than inventions. In its most general outline a Chinese romantic comedy consisted of a handsome youth with brilliant literary gifts falling in love with a beautiful and talented girl and, after overcoming a number of vicissitudes, marrying her. By the seventeenth century countless stories and plays, some of them masterpieces, had been written to this formula. But Li Yu would have none of it. In his first play (or opera, both terms apply), Lianxiang ban, a title freely translatable as Women in Love, he adapted the formula and applied it-for the first, and perhaps only, time in the history of Chinese literature-to a love affair between two women. Eventually the lovers are united as wives to the same man-the only solution open to them. Similarly, in Li Yu's Silent Operas (Wusheng xi) collection, there is a story about a love affair between two men that derives its comic power from the way it parallels a perfect heterosexual marriage, all the way from courtship to widowhood. Examples of comic discovery and invention abound also in his novel, The Carnal Prayer Mat (Rou putuan).

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