The invention of Li Yu.

• Author: Cass, Victoria B.

In his biography cum criticism of the Ming dramatist Li Yu (1610-1680), Patrick Hanan takes on the bugbear of highmindedness. Hanan states, in the introduction, "This book is concerned with the `false' Li Yu and his generally comic permutations of self, rather than with any search for a `true' Li Yu" (p. vii). Here Hanan tweaks the critics who have praised Li Yu for the few "serious" poems he wrote, critics who imply that the high-toned moralistic laments of these few poems are a "truer" voice of the poet than the voice found in his many ribald, iconoclastic, self-advertising, and decidedly unserious works. For Hanan's book, as his title implies, is concerned with the unabashedly comic Li Yu: Li Yu as he invents himself from one moment to the next, and Li Yu as he reinvents the conventions of drama, fiction, and classical prose essays with inversions and reversals of the expected.

In taking on Li Yu's comic self, however, Hanan also takes on the difficult job of the interpretation of comedy. Susanne K. Langer asserted that comedy "expresses the elementary strains and resolutions of animate nature . . . , the delight that man takes in his special mental gifts that make him lord of creation." She asserts that comedy is an "image of human vitality holding its own in the world. . . ." But what makes for brilliant comic images of the vital and the defiant does not necessarily make for easy critical interpretation. Indeed comedies typically are slighted by critics. The catharsis in tragedy is far more yielding to academic assessment than the pratfall in farce. And therein lies the charm of this book. Hanan has applied his extensive knowledge of Ming literature to the constant mutations of the craft of the comic.

The collected works of Li Yu are varied and numerous. Hanan discusses in detail the ten extant plays, three short-story collections, the novel, The Carnal Prayer Mat, and the brilliant prose work Casual Expressions. He also treats Li Yu's essays, both formal and informal, as well as his prefaces, letters, and pleas for patronage, in addition to his writings on history, collections of letters, parallel prose works, and the legal cases that Li Yu edited. This study is therefore a complete overview of Li Yu as dramatist, critic, publisher, author, garden designer, artist, gourmet, hedonist, friend, and family man. The corpus underlying this study is immense and immensely varied; but as a result the reader finally acquires a full sense of Li...