I
live in town without all that racket
horses
and carts stir up, and you wonder
how
that could be. Wherever the mind
dwells
apart is itself a distant place.
picking
chrysanthemums at my east fence,
far
off, I see South Mountain: mountain
air
lovely at dusk, birds in flight
returning
home. All this means something,
something
absolute. Whenever I start
explaining
it, I’ve forgotten the words.
Tao Qian
trans:
David Hinton
This enormous novel occupies the same
central place in the literary culture of the Chinese as the works of
Shakespeare do in English, as Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin does in Russian, and as Dante’s Divine Comedy does in Italian literature. Like them, it creates a
whole world that is at once very specific to a time and place (China in the
middle of the 18th century) and yet also universal. Like them it
embodies the paradox of great art, best expressed by Matisse: All art bears the imprint of
its historical epoch. Great art is that in which this imprint is most deeply
marked.
And yet in the West the novel is hardly
known at all. Reasons for this no doubt include unfamiliarity with the world
the novel describes and creates, the vast number of characters (with names
which are more than usually difficult for Western readers to remember) and its
sheer length. It’s even difficult to arrive at a fixed title for the work,
compounded by the fact that in Chinese it has many names, all of them given in
the text itself. These titles include: The
Story of the Stone, The Precious Mirror of Love, The Twelve Beauties of
Jingling, and Dream of Red Mansions.
The Penguin translation by David Hawkes uses the first of these titles. Dream of Red Mansions is the closest translation
(by Yang Hsien Yi and Gladys Yang) of the most common Chinese title, but other
translations of this title might also include A Dream of the Red Chamber, or Dreams
in a Red Chamber. This plethora of titles and translations of titles neatly
reflects the great difficulties of translating a work from a language in which
ambiguity is prized and preserved, into language where it is not.
Given these difficulties for a Western
reader, perhaps the best way to approach this work is to look closely at the
three characters which make up the most common title in Chinese. In so doing,
we shall see that each one loosely defines a category that might help us to
orient ourselves in the multifarious world of the Hong Lou Meng.
oooOOOooo
紅/hong/
red
This character consists of two
elements. On the left is the ‘silk’ radical /si/, on the right is the ‘work’
radical, /gong/, here to give a suggestion as to the correct way to pronounce
this character.
Silk is of course the
quintessentially Chinese product, and silk cultivation and production has been
known in China since the Neolithic age. Silk is a signifier of wealth and patronage,
and has been used since ancient times as an instrument of foreign policy. Sima
Qian, the Grand Historian of the Han dynasty, records how the first Han emperor
sent a specified quantity of silk floss
and cloth, grain and other food stuffs each year to the Xiongnu, the
ancient enemies of the Han, so that the two nations would live in peace and brotherhood. In the Hong Lou Meng, at weddings and festivals, the fabulously wealthy Jia family are presented with rolls of
silk, and they lavish gifts of silk on their superiors. The early part of the
novel especially is filled with descriptions of clothes and furnishings, all of
them costly and beautiful.
The silk radical also appears in characters
to do with ‘binding’, ‘braiding’, ‘roping’, and also in characters to do with ‘patterns’,
‘succession’ or ‘continuation’, ‘experience’, in other words, the underlying
patterns of everyday life, familial associations and experiences, in which communities
are bound together through work, ritual ceremony and festivals. Red is
ubiquitous in the Chinese world to an extent that is not so in other cultures:
a red light always burns before the family altar; a wedding is not a wedding
without the presence of red; red lanterns adorn the temples and gifts of money
are made in red envelopes. Likewise in the Hong
Lou Meng, red is everywhere. Baoyu, the male protagonist, lives in a
pavilion called ‘Happy Red Court’, and in Chapter 1, Cao Xueqin is described as
having written the work in his studio called ‘Mourning-the-Red Studio’. In its widest form, red always symbolizes festival.
The novel is full of lavish and evocative descriptions of ceremonies and
festivals, weddings, funerals, New Years Eve celebrations, the Lantern Festival
celebration; Cao Xueqin writes with a painterly hand, creating images as
unforgettable as the cinematic images of Zhang Yimou. In the novel, as in
Chinese life, great prominence is given to rites and rituals, both on major
state occasions and the minor rituals of dining at home with family. In Chapter
2, an official is impeached, and a list of the crimes against him is given; the
second item on this list is ‘tampering with the rites’ which shows the
importance given by the Chinese to rites and ceremony.
Red also symbolizes art and beauty. A
white, black and grey ink painting is not considered beautiful until it is set
off by the artist’s seal in red ink. One of the women in the family is a
talented artist and she is painting a huge picture of the garden in which a
great deal of the action of the novel takes place. Her picture becomes a symbol
of the Hong Lou Meng itself.
The ‘silk’ radical which makes up the
character ‘red’ also appears in the characters for ‘literary classic’, and ‘paper’.
The Hong Lou Meng itself has given
rise to a paper mountain of critical commentary, known as Redology紅學. The Hong Lou Meng abounds with descriptions
of people interacting with the classics, and creating art and literature of
their own. Baoyu and his soulmate, the beautiful and doomed Daiyu, read the Romance of the West Chamber 西廂記 together, a Yuan dynasty play. In Chapter 37, the young people
in the Jia family start a poetry club, in which they drink, eat and set each
other subjects – and rhyme schemes - for
poetry. At one autumn meeting of the
club, the chrysanthemum is chosen as a subject, but someone objects that this
is too hackneyed a subject for an autumn poem. Then someone has an idea that
instead of writing about chrysanthemums, they will focus on the people looking
at it and on their reactions to the flower. They come up with a list of
subjects:
Thinking of the Chrysanthemum
Seeking
out the Chrysanthemum
Visiting
the Chrysanthemum
Planting
the Chrysanthemum
Facing
the Chrysanthemum
Displaying
the Chrysanthemum
Writing
about the Chrysanthemum
Painting
the Chrysanthemum
Questioning
the Chrysanthemum
Wearing
the Chrysanthemum
The
Chrysanthemum’s Shadow
A
Dream of Chrysanthemum
The
Withered Chrysanthemum
And then go on to create an album of
chrysanthemum poems. This is a picture of the pastime of leisured, rich,
educated, secluded women, but it’s also a picture of the age–old activity of
the literati/scholar class. The novel is full of such scenes. There is a great
deal of sophisticated wordplay, both by the narrator and by the characters and
absolutely untranslatable jokes and puns. The characters (people) discuss the
meaning of characters (words, symbols), and they seem able to make up poems
according to a rhyme scheme proposed by someone else at the flick of a sleeve,
quite an accomplishment, given that many of them are only teenagers. But what’s
most interesting to note about this little scene is the tension, the dilemma it
voices between following the traditional rules laid down by the masters
(Confucian idea), and originality (Daoist idea), a tension that can be seen in
the Hong Lou Meng as a whole.
Etiquette and manners are also
presented with the full importance which they are given in real life; who sits
where, who serves whom, who takes precedence over whom, who gives face to whom,
an incredibly complex affair in a family as large and multi-generational as the
Jia family with its army of 200 - 300 retainers, all with a pecking order of
their own.
‘Red’, then, in the Hong Lou Meng represents the world of art
and beauty, literature and scholarship, rite and ceremony, manners and etiquette,
which bind the family and the wider society together.
oooOOOooo
樓
/lou/
building
This character (pronounced ‘low’)
consists of four elements. On the left is the ‘wood’ radical /mu/. The ‘wood’
radical is found in all characters describing objects made of wood, and in
characters to do with constructed objects, such as machines and engines and
buildings.
The right element consists of a
character that can stand alone, independently, with the same pronunciation as the
composite character, when it is the name of a constellation, and a common
family name.
This character is composed of three
elements. The top element used to be a slightly different character meaning
something like ‘don’t’, and this character combined with the character for
‘woman’ meant ‘seclusion’, or the women’s quarters which were taboo to
outsiders. The middle element is actually the same character for ‘middle’
/zhong/ and it’s the character which appears in ‘China’: ‘the Middle Kingdom’.
The bottom element is the character for ‘woman’ /nu/.
The character has a range of
meanings, most literally any building more than two stories high, and the
floors in such a building. But the history of the character shows us that it was
also associated with that part of a building that was reserved for the women,
and to which outsiders were not permitted.
The action of the novel revolves
around two huge mansions, the Rong mansion and the Ning mansion, and an
enormous park or garden which lies between them. There are almost no glimpses
of nature outside the compound walls. Most of the scenes take place in
interiors, or in the carefully controlled ‘natural’ environment of the
ornamental park, specially constructed for the visit home of an elder daughter
of the family who is an Imperial Concubine. The two branches of the Jia family
gain much of their social prestige and wealth from this daughter’s position in
the Imperial household, and her death is one of several turning points in the fortunes
of the family.
This domestic world is the scene of
operations of that archetypal figure in Chinese culture and history: the uberbitch. Jia Xifeng, the wife of one
of the grandsons first achieves prominence through her exceptional
organizational skills at the funeral of another woman in the family, and soon
thereafter is given the overall management of the Ning mansion, a task that she
manages with aplomb, maintaining everyone in the lavish lifestyle they are all
accustomed to, while secretly putting aside silver and lending it out at
interest, which activity eventually contributes to the downfall of the family.
Her position is protected because her ready wit makes her a special favourite
of the Lady Dowager. When she secretly discovers that her good-for-nothing
husband has secretly taken a second wife and established her in a household of
her own in a lane behind the family compound, Xifeng insists on having the second wife brought into the mansion and
installed as official concubine, treating her with fastidious kindness and
correctness. She then poisons her, after months of physical and mental torture
and calculated cruelty. Xifeng comes from a long line of Chinese uberbitches: the Han dynasty Empress Lu cut off her chief rival’s hands and feet,
plucked out her eyes, burned her ears, gave her a potion to drink which made
her dumb and had her thrown in to the privy, calling her ‘the human pig, Sima
Qian tells us. Ironically, that 20th century uberbitch Madame Mao- Jiang Qing- used Hong Lou Meng as a pretext to launch a political attack on an old
rival from her sing-song girl days. But it is in the nature of uberbitches that they fall, and many
pages and chapters later, Xifeng meets her own miserable end.
Over against this chambered world of
the women, is the wider social world of the men. Baoyu is sent to school where
he learns to interact with boys his own age after a lifetime spent only in the
company of women. This incident is one of the main homosexual episodes in a
novel that contains many homosexual characters and scenes. The men in the
family have social obligations and political roles outside the family. The Lady
Dowager’s two sons are active ministers in the Qing government, and the
fortunes of the family are closely tied to their fortunes in the political
world. It’s this aspect of the novel where Confucian ideology is most visible.
Baoyu is sent to school to study the Four Classics of Confucian thought 四書;
throughout the novel, incident after incident shows the workings of the
Confucian concept of filial piety 孝, most notably in Baoyu’s relations
with his father, and in everyone else’s relations with their parents. This is
extended to include filial piety towards ones ancestors. Towards the end of the
book, when the mansions are raided by the government, Baoyu’s father’s first
worry is how to protect the ancestors from the fall from grace that this will
entail for the family. There is a subplot involving a peripheral member of the
family who is arrested for murder, which gives us a wealth of information about
Qing legal procedures (and how they are corrupted as a matter of course). However,
despite these occasional excursions to the world outside the mansion, the men
are usually assigned to a peripheral role and serve most often as messengers –
both literally and symbolically - from outside the walls of the mansion, or a
means by which women can assert their dominance over other women through
marriage, concubinage or sexual liaison.
Here, then, in our reading of the Hong Lou Meng we let ‘building’ stand for the sequestered world of
the women’s quarters, the constructed social order both within the mansion and
without, and the Confucian ideals of social harmony and correct behaviour.
oooOOOooo
夢/meng/ dream
This character (pronounced as the first syllable in ‘mongrel’)
consists of four elements from top to bottom. The top element is the ‘grass’ or
‘seedling’ radical /cao/; next comes a radical that can mean both ‘eye’ /mu/ and
‘net’ /wang/. Under this is the ‘roof’ radical, /mien/, with one small stroke
missing. The bottom part of the character is the sign for ‘dusk’ /xi/, which is
a representation of the moon. So we have a character highly evocative of the
way dreams sprout from the imagination at dusk under a roof and are caught in
the net of the mind’s eye.
The character for /meng/ contains a picture of the moon. 20th century
Lao Tzu commentator Du Erwei draws a connection between the Dao and the moon; the
Ying Yang symbol of the Dao is a picture of the waning and waxing moon. And so
we let this character stand for the Ying side of the novel, for the many
dreams, ghosts and hauntings, and the spirit of Daoism that pervades the book.
The novel contains many magnificent night scenes and moon
sightings. Dreams abound. In the first chapter, an old scholar dreams of an
encounter between a Buddhist and a Daoist monk, a dream in which the
symbolic, metaphysical meaning of the
novel you are about to read is explained. Baoyu has a very significant dream in
chapter 5, which he then dreams again in Chapter 116. These dreams are not so
much dreams as Shamanistic spirit journeys of the kind described in the Li Sao, a famous poem from the 3rd Century BC anthology Songs of the South 楚辭. Such dream journeys are an intrinsic part of Daoist poetry
and meditation practices. In the Hong Lou
Meng, when characters die, or are about to die, they appear as ghosts or
are seen by other characters in dreams. Indeed, the whole novel is seen as a
dream, in the way that Daoist and Buddhist thought see reality as a dream.
Against reality and against the Confucian ideals of familial
piety and obedience to your superior are set the more esoteric teachings of Daoism
and Buddhism, which teach that all such ideals, - and indeed, reality itself – are illusions. The
novel can be understood as a site of interplay between these three great
systems of Chinese thought, in which the author comes down heavily on the side
of Daoism. Confucianism, it is carefully suggested, is null and does little to
stop the corruption of officials or the debauchery of men. People pay lip
service to it, and it creates hypocrisy. Buddhists are presented as charlatans
who use planchettes and sand writing to foretell the future. The most
significant Buddhist character in the novel – the beautiful maid Miaoyu - meets
a highly unpleasant and tragic end. While plenty of Daoist texts are quoted
verbatim in the novel – especially the Zhuangzi
- (as far as I remember) not one Buddhist sutra is (although the famous Bodhi
tree gathas of the contest between Shenxiu and Huineng are).
Dreams, ghosts, divination are all intrinsic to Daoist ideas and
practice. The novel’s overriding theme and structure – the vicissitudes of
change – is also a primary Daoist concern. Characters muse on their own fates
and the fate of the family and wonder how change could come so suddenly. These
meditations on change and destiny are limited to the effects of change in this
life only (and the afterlife) but there is almost no appearance of a theme
connected to repeated lives, no discussion of karma, a prime Buddhist concern.
The novel’s alignment with Daoist over Confucian and Buddhist
ideologies is seen most clearly in the character of the protagonist. Although
Baoyu in the early part of the novel is called ‘Little Bodhisattva’ by his
nurses, this is no more than a standard term of endearment for a young child. As
he grows up, Baoyu reads Zhuangzi when he should be studying Confucian
classics. In chapter 21, he reads The
Housebreaker text from the Zhuangzi,
whose basic message is that out of destruction comes liberation and creativity.
He is inspired to create his own commentary to it, adapting Zhuangzi to his own
circumstances. Do away with affection,
he writes, and in the inner chambers fair
and foul will then be on an equal footing. Advice kept to oneself does away
with the danger of discord; beauty marred obviates affection, intelligence
dulled cuts out admiration for talents. On another occasion, exasperated to his wits
end by all the emotional demands made on
him by the women of his chambers, he is reminded of this passage in Zhuangzi:
The ingenious work hard, the wise are full of care, but those without ability have no ambition. They enjoy their food and wander at will like drifting boats freed from their moorings.
At the end, Baoyu rejects the Confucian world that has opened up
to him by his brilliant performance in the examination, and goes off, not to
shave his head and join a sangha as a Buddhist monk, but to roam the
countryside as a Daoist bum.
It makes sense that a writer as sophisticated as Cao Xueqin
should ultimately come down on the side of Daoism as a resolution for his
protagonist’s fate, because the teachings of Daoism come closer to an
understanding of the perennial concerns of the really great novelists, namely
the nature of fiction and its relationship to reality. Daoism has a more,
creative approach to illusion, allegory, and symbolism; at the same time it
also has a thorough awareness of the difficulties of communicating these things
through language than either Chan Buddhism or Confucianism. The name
that can be named is not the constant name, says the first line of the Dao Der Jing. Zhuangzi writes: The Dao is not named/Great division is not spoken….who can understand
division that is not spoken, or Dao that is not named? In chapter 102 the
characters consult the Yi Jing, and
the hexagrams the oracle gives them foretell the fates of the characters
consulting them, in an example of sophisticated structural foreshadowing that
the Chinese prize as one of the great literary innovations Cao Xueqin made in
the novel as a literary genre.
Lin Yu Tang, an early 20th century cultural
commentator, wrote on the influence of Daoism in Chinese literature: All good Chinese literature, all Chinese
literature that is worth while, that is readable and that pleases the human
mind and soothes the human heart is essentially imbued with a Daoistic spirit.
The Daoist underpinnings of the work result in an almost
post-modernist awareness of itself as a work of fiction, an illusion. The very first
named character in the novel is Zhen Shiying, which is a homophone for ‘true
things disappear’; Jia, the family name of the main characters, is a homophone
for ‘unreal’, ‘fake’, ‘false’. Jia Baoyu has a distant relative his own age,
also called Baoyu, who is in effect his double, but his name is Zhen Baoyu,
which means ‘real’ Baoyu. These two encounter one another in a dream, and when
they awake, neither of them knows who the real Baoyu is. Zhuangzi, famously,
dreamed he was a butterfly, but upon waking could not decide whether he had
been Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly, or if he was a butterfly dreaming he
was Zhuangzi. If reality is a dream, then a novel about reality is a dream
within a dream, in which dreams about reality appear in a reality about dreams.
In chapter 1, as the reader is embarking on this sojourn into a
fictional world, a Daoist priest begins
a journey into the Land of Illusion, passing through an archway on both pillars
of which is inscribed the following couplet:
When false is taken for true, true becomes false
If
non-being turns into being, being becomes non-being.
This of course is meant in a metaphysical sense, but what if we
read it meta-fictionally, as Cao Xueqin seems to be asking us to do? As devoted
readers, when we immerse ourselves into a fictional world, isn’t false taken
for true? As we yearn to follow the fate of our favourite character, doesn’t
being become non-being? Near the very
end, the narrator comments in another couplet:
A
book not of this world records events not of this world.
A man
with two lives reverts to his original form.
As we finish the novel - any totally absorbing novel - we revert
to our original form, to ourselves.
The whole novel is set within a framing device which can, on the
one hand, be seen as a Daoist metaphysics, and on the other, as a literary
meta-fiction designed to forestall any possible political fall out for the
author. The whole novel is revealed as having been engraved on a huge stone.
This stone then reappears in the mouth of Baoyu at his birth (‘baoyu’ literally
means ‘precious jade’). The whole engraving is copied down by a Daoist monk
called Reverend Void and given to CXQ, who spends 10 years working it up…
oooOOOooo
The Hong Lou Meng, with its cast of hundreds of characters, its great
length, and the timespan covered, is an epic novel. But to read it is to get an
impression of intimacy rather than heroic size. Cao Xueqin’s emphasis on the
inner life of the characters, on scenes of domesticity, on the economic and
political sphere as it operates within one (huge) family make the novel a
series of miniatures. The closest parallel to Western literature, stylistically
and in terms of genre, I suppose, would be the novels of Jane Austen, or Thomas
Mann’s Buddenbrooks, or other novels
which focus on women or family life and which use this as an allegory for a
wider political view.
The novel is not an easy read: at
first, the world of Qing dynasty China appears to have no relevance to the
reader, and it does go on and on and on, demanding a large investment of time
(and patience, it must be said). The first chapter is particularly taxing,
which does Cao Xueqin no favours. But, inexorably, if you stick with it, you
are drawn slowly in; the incidents are ones which reach across cultures and
centuries to our own lives and remain imprinted in memory: a child’s temper
tantrum, first love, a grandmother’s death in the bosom of her family, a
birthday celebration, a sleepless night caused by anxiety over the future, the
pangs of lust, the love of home.
Daniel Johnson wrote in his review of
another long, modern novel, Vikram Seth’s A
Suitable Boy words which might just as fittingly be applied to Hong Lou Meng: You should make time for it.
It will keep you company for the rest of your life.
1 comment:
Great to see you post again. This one's been on my list a long time, just moved it up.
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