This paper discusses the practice of judicial torture as it is represented in the "court case stories" (gongan xiaoshuo, (sic)) collected in the three major anthologies of vernacular stories edited by Feng Menglong ((sic), 1574-1646) of the Ming dynasty. In a literary form with such a broad appeal, one might expect to find torture represented as a spectacle and as a highly effective means of accessing the concealed narratives of crime contained with human subjects who are made the objects of torture. Instead, one finds judicial torture represented in routine, almost mundane, terms as a practice that often fails to extract the truth and even at times obscures it. The magistrate who uses judicial torture in his court can be classified as one of the following: (1) the excellent, who is so wise that he does not need to use it; (2) the competent, who uses torture during interrogation only according to the rule of law when he feels that the guilt of the accused has already been demonstrated through evidence and testimony; (3) the ignorant, who uses torture too readily before collecting sufficient corroborating evidence and testimony and often extracts false confessions; and (4) the evil, who is fully cognizant of the innocence of his victim but uses torture during interrogation out of personal motivations of avarice or revenge. The true spectacle that these narratives depict is the cosmic force of boo ((sic)), or "retribution," at work. Torture in these stories is depicted as a means to allow three types of narratives to unfold, intersect and reach their appropriate moments of closure: (1) the narrative of the original crime, (2) the narrative of the legal proceedings investigating the crime, and (3) the narrative of cosmic retribution, which shows that evildoers are punished in the end, often after long delays and legal complications. The practice of torture stands at the intersection of these narratives for it is employed or threatened by magistrates to gain access to the narrative of the crime, so that it can be subsumed by and bring closure to the legal narrative, thus allowing the demands of the cosmic narrative of retribution to be satisfied. The aesthetic of vernacular stories dictates that the legal narrative and the narrative of retribution must be brought into alignment by the end of the story, although many years may pass before this is accomplished.
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