Adventure classics – Too wise in the ways of the world

Dream of the Red Chamber

by Cao Xueqin (Tsao Hsueh-Chin)

***

“Nowadays it is necessary for every official to have his own private list of the powerful families in his district. Without such a list to guide him, he might unwittingly offend one of these families, in which case he will not only lose his office, but lose his life as well,” a character tells a newly-appointed magistrate early in Cao Xueqin’s 18^th century classic, Dream of the Red Chamber, sowing the seeds of hypocrisy and corruption that will doom not only the romance of two young people but their families’ well-being.

By the time the spoiled hero Jia Baoyu (Precious Jade) declares his love for his cousin, Lin Daiyu (Black Jade), who came to live in his family household following the death of her mother, he has already tried to seduce one of the maids of his mother, who is outraged, not at him, but at the maid, sending her home in disgrace.

And “though he was sorry and ashamed for having got (the girl) into trouble, he was not particularly concerned over it . . . (and) thought nothing more of the incident.”

(In the course of his doomed love affair with Daiyu, Baoyu will also be seduced by another young woman in the household, although Wang Chi-Chen, the translator of my 1958 edition, leaves open the possibility that Baoyu’s sexual initiation may have been a dream rather than a reality.)

Last Friday I wrote that Dream of the Red Chamber made me think of the stories of Jane Austen, a product of the same century as Cao Xueqin. Austen wrote about illicit liaisons with what seems startling frankness for an unmarried woman of her time. But the randiness that keeps readers coming back to romances set in Austen’s Regency England would have applied as much to Cao’s China. And although both writers accept such affairs as the way the world goes round, at the distance of the 21^st century readers must wonder if Baoyu’s willingness to succumb whatever temptations come his way isn’t the real reason for his apparently heartless abandonment of Daiyu at his family’s insistence.

So now we’re back to the acceptance of social and political pressure that led the young magistrate at the beginning of this post to accept that there was one justice for the powerful and another for the powerless.

It was a system Cao was only too familiar with. As Baoyu’s family had risen to its greatest prominence through his older sister’s position as an imperial concubine, Cao’s family rose to power when his grandfather became the favorite courtier of Emperor Kangxi (K’ang Hsi). (Cao discreetly omits mentioning the time in which his novel is set, but there is no doubt that it describes the time of the Qing dynasty in which he and his family lived.)

Although Cao’s grandfather was a man of letters, he also entertained lavishly, writes translator Wang, entertaining the emperor to the point of bankruptcy. From then on, the Cao family fortunes fluctuated wildly. Will the emperor find a lucrative post for his favorites? Will a new ruler rescind previous privileges? By 1742, Cao was living in near poverty. By the mid-1760’s, he was dead, grieving for the loss of his son, but leaving behind not only a “new wife” and 80 chapters of his literary masterpiece.

After his death, the manuscript circulated privately until a 120-chapter version surfaced in 1792. The final 40 chapters restored the fortunes of the Jia family following the tragic love affair of Baoyu and Daiyu. But was it all the work of the master, or had another (possibly the “new wife” mentioned in a friend’s memoriam poem) added a happy (or happier) ending to make the manuscript more palatable to readers of the period? Most likely all we will ever know is that Cao’s original resonated so strongly that nearly a dozen “continuations,” the equivalent of today’s fan fiction, exist, tying a happy ending onto the original tragedy.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins a June of writings about Texas and the Southwest with Native American author N. Scott Momaday’s The Ancient Child.)

Adventure classics – Channeling Austen (or Cao Xueqin)

Dream of the Red Chamber

by Cao Xueqin (Tsao Hsueh-Chin)

***

The 18th century Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber, written by Cao Xueqin (or in the earlier method of transliteration, Tsao Hsueh-Chin), is sometimes compared with Romeo and Juliet because of its tragic love story. A 21st century adapter, Pauline A. Chen, compares it to Gone with the Wind for its depiction of a young man torn between the love of two women as his aristocratic society falls into decline. But the comparison that most struck me when I began the 1958 translation by Wang Chi-Chen was to . . . Jane Austen.

Written by a near contemporary of Austen on the opposite side of the world, Dream of the Red Chamber’s depictions of ordinary life, and especially of the interests of women, broke with the classical Chinese literature of its day.

As we learn in the opening chapter, the story is ostensibly written on a celestial stone (previously incarnated as the novel’s hero). Wise critics object to publishing the story on the grounds that “There is no mention of exemplary virtues and illustrious deeds. We have here only a tale of a few romantic and sentimental maidens.” The stone rebuts their objections, citing the flaws of standard literature – its stereotyped heroes, heroines and villains. “It is much better, it would seem to me,” the stone says, “to record the lives of the several maidens whom I have seen with my own eyes and have listened to with my own ears during the short span of my life on earth.”

And so the story was told – of the love of the spoiled hero, Baoyu, (Precious Jade, literally born with the immortal stone in his mouth) for both the beautiful but unconventional Daiyu (Black Jade) and the equally lovely but conventional Baochai (Precious Virtue), whose translated name alone is enough to make her anathema to Janeites.

So what have we got? A handsome but entitled hero, Baoyu, (shades of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy as well as of the more sinister John Willoughby of Sense and Sensibility). Then there’s the thinks-for-herself Daiyu (P&P’s Elizabeth Bennett); the daughter of a widowed, self-absorbed father (Emma); the large, unruly and uncongenial family to which she is sent following her mother’s death (more P&P, not to mention Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park); the sometimes stultifying conventions of etiquette and mores; and the familial, economic and social pressures to marry the “right” person, regardless of the claims of the heart. All of these being tropes devotees of either Red Chamber or Austen’s novels know by heart.

It’s enough to make a reader wonder whether there was something catching in the worldwide atmosphere of the late 18th century. Or more fancifully, to wonder whether Austen (born 1775) might have been a reincarnation of Cao (died approximately 1764).

The simpler reason for the convergence, the reason that made Red Chamber a hit with everyone from its 18th century readers to Mao Zedong (despite later outlawing the book during the Cultural Revolution) to readers of Pauline Chen’s leaner modern adaption is that, as the now sadder but wiser hero/stone says, “the average man of the marketplace generally prefers unpretentious works of fiction to treatises with a serious purpose. . . I do not wish people to praise my story as unique and wonderful, or to consult it for moral guidance. I only hope they may find distraction in its pages when they are satiated. . . or when sorrow and disappointment cause them to seek solace. . . .”

The stone, of course, may be less than ingenuous in his/its protestation. Dream of the Red Chamber (like the Gothic thrillers Northanger Abbey heroine Catherine Morland delighted in) is actually a huge book. With its nearly 40 major characters (and another 300 or so minor ones), and extensive depiction of Chinese life and culture of the time, it’s complex enough to have spawned its own academic field, dubbed Redology.

I’ll take next Friday’s post to explore at least the love story of Dream of the Red Chamber, without getting overly scholarly. In the meantime, consider tasting the modern-language sample of Pauline A. Chen’s version at NPR Books. And imagine, in some literary heaven, Jane Austen and Cao Xueqin sitting down to a fine chat over afternoon tea.

(On a completely different note, there’s some serious literary adventure going on with DL Hammons WRiTE CLUB 2015 contest. Check out the contenders and vote for your favorite on his blog.)