17 Analyzing Poetry in “Judge Bao Solves a Case through a Ghost That Appeared Thrice”

The story “Judge Bao Solves a Case through a Ghost That Appeared Thrice” (San xianshen bao long tu duan yuan 三現身包龍圖斷冤) is not abnormal in the fact that it mixes standard prose writing with poetic verse, but the way it does so is special. The poems within the story can be split up into two groups, those that are diegetic, or in the world of the story, and those that are not. These two groups of poems work differently and towards different ends, both as a natural effect of diegesis and due to the way they are written and written into the story. The non-diegetic poems are separated from the rest of the text in a way that emphasizes their presence and draws the attention of the reader in order to make the descriptions they contain stand out more, while the diegetic poetry is folded into the narrative so that it may simultaneously advance the plot by how characters interact with it and draw the reader into the world by placing them in the same position as characters within the world.

The majority of the non-diegetic poetry in Judge Bao follows a simple pattern for how it is introduced into the text, where the text leads into it, priming the reader for the poetry being a description. An example of this would be:

There, for all to see, was

A man in rags with a brimless and tattered hat

A frosty beard, sightless eyes, and stooping shoulders^[1]

The poetry in this excerpt is all description of a character, and nothing more. Its role in the story as a whole is for the reader’s sake only, as it only serves to help set the scene and prepare the reader for whatever this character does going forward. However, this short chunk of poetry is emphasized by the shift from prose to poetry. This shift happens in the middle of the sentence, which makes the transition between the two modes very abrupt and causes the reader to focus on the poetry more as it stands out from the text surrounding it. Poetry also tends to be much more memorable than prose; many traditional Chinese texts that required memorization, such as medicinal books, would be written in poetic form, as the rhyme and rhythm (the poems in “Judge Bao” follow both rhythm and rhyming schemes in their original Chinese) would make the contents easier to remember and recall for the scholar. There are, however, examples of non-diegetic poetry in “Judge Bao” that are integrated into the text differently as having no transition such as “And he was indeed most accurate in his applications of the yin and yang theories in his divinations. Well-versed in the Book of Changes of Zhou . . . He never missed the mark on his prophecies”^[2] or not doing so in the middle of a sentence like “How did this end for the fortune-teller? For all his knowledge of human affairs, He brought upon himself sorrows galore.”^[3] The latter here, however, is not that much different from the first example, as the prose leading into it sets up the poetry and clearly tells what that poem is going to be about. The reader knows what the poem’s goal is, and reads it with that in mind. The former has no such set up, as there is no direct transition between the prose and the poetry, but the poem functions to do the same thing as the line of prose before it. The preceding line describes how good of a diviner this fortune teller is, and the poem itself goes into the details of what divining methods he uses and how good at them he is. In doing so, it provides much more weight to this fortune-teller, making him much more significant than if he was just described in prose. Regardless of how specifically a non-diegetic piece of poetry is introduced into the story, it’s meant to be an abrupt shift in form that draws the reader’s attention to the content of the poem, making the descriptions contained within more impactful and memorable.

The diegetic poetry in “Judge Bao” is more restricted in how it can be introduced, because in order to be established as diegetic, it needs to be established how the poem came to be in the world. The narrative does this by showing where the poem is or how it was written. This is done as follows: “On the third night after taking up office, before he [Magistrate Bao] began to attend to official business, he had a dream in which he was seated in a hall with a couplet posted on the wall: To know what happened at the third watch of the night, Remove the fire and drain the water underneath.”^[4] The preceding line to the poem describes exactly when and where Magistrate Bao saw this poem, placing the reader in that scene with him, and allowing them to read the poem together with him. This is the case with the other diegetic poems as well, even if the methods differ slightly. One poem is introduced by saying that “the fortune-teller wrote a quatrain that said,” another is introduced with “a scroll of paper bearing the following transcription:” but in all these cases the reader is reading the poem as it is perceived in the world.^[5] The reader “discovers” the poem in the text of the story as the characters they see the world through see it, whether it be reading it with a character as it is found or reading it as it is written into being. This closes the distance between the reader and the world of the story, as it integrates the reader’s experience into that world. Additionally, as a normal consequence of something being diegetic, these poems can and do advance the plot. The non-diegetic poems are purely for the reader’s sake as they don’t interact with the world of the story, but for diegetic poems they must interact with the world in order to be diegetic, and the way that interaction is conveyed is through characters interacting with the poems, whether it be writing them like the fortune-teller or reading them like Bao. This allows the poems to influence the characters and what they will do down the line, such as Bao reacting to seeing the poem in his dream by bringing it to the court to interpret, and later by Wang Xing recognizing the couplet and coming forward. Diegetic poetry works both to support the reader’s experience of the story by shortening the distance between them and the world and by moving the plot forward as characters interact with it.

The use of poetry in Chinese prose writing, while not ubiquitous, is certainly not uncommon, with stories as prevalent as the Journey to the West using it liberally. “Judge Bao,”however, is different, as it uses poetry in two ways, being non-diegetic, which is common in other works, to make a description more flowery and make the reader focus on it more, and diegetic, which is fairly unique to “Judge Bao,” being used to close the distance between reader and story, as well as to advance the plot, a gap which allows the reader to, based on the context provided by the prose surrounding it, figure out what the poem’s function is within the larger story as a whole.

Bibliography

Feng, Menglong 馮夢龍, “Judge Bao Solves a Case through a Ghost that Appeared Thrice,” San xianshen bao long tu duan yuan 三現身包龍圖斷冤. Translated by Yunqin Yang and Shuhui Yang. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. 198-211.