by Steven Moore
Soon there was a crowd of thousands and thousands, shouting and yelling, who came to read the placard. At first only a general clamor was heard, but then there were sounds of crying and cursing. Finally the crowd broke up and people walked away one by one. One of them sat vacantly on a stone; one smashed his inkstand made of interlocking tiles; one with his hair hanging like tumbleweed was being chased and swatted by his parents and teachers; one opened the case he clutched to his side, took out his jade lute, burned it, then cried bitterly; one who took a sword from the headboard of his bed and tried to kill himself was stopped by a girl; one, his head bowed absent-mindedly, took out his own essay and read it over and over; one laughed loudly and pounded the table shouting “Fate! Fate! Fate!”; one hung his head and vomited blood; several elders bought spring wine to help ease the depression of another; one chanting poems alone wildly kicked a stone at the end of each line of verse; one wouldn’t allow his boyservants to report that his name didn’t appear on the list; one had the appearance of being angry and depressed but smiled frostily to himself as if to say, “I deserved it”; one was truly angry and unhappy but forced a smile. (4)
Some of these losers became novelists.
Wu Jingzi’s forebears passed these exams and held important offices, but his father turned his back on that life in favor of Confucian self-cultivation. Wu followed in his footsteps, passing a preliminary exam in 1723 but not bothering to take others. After a dissipated period of squandering the family fortune and hanging out with actors and prostitutes in Nanjing, he settled for a life of genteel poverty, writing poems and essays (sometimes for money), and around 1736 began writing his novel about the kinds of “scholars” the exam system was spitting out. Though set in the Ming Dynasty, specifically in the years 1487 to 1595, most of the characters in The Scholars are based on people from Wu’s own time, two centuries later. (The exam system instituted at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty remained pretty much the same until the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.) But Wu goes beyond mocking the civil-service system to lament the decline of Confucian values of integrity and virtuous conduct in his age. As a father in the novel tells his son, “Now, Chao-jen, you have been lucky enough to pass the examination, and may go further later. But fame and fortune are external things after all; it’s goodness that really counts.”38
The Scholars falls into three sections, bookended by a prologue and epilogue. Chapters 2 through 30, occupying about 50 years, features a number of graduates and scholars, successful and otherwise, in a series of vignettes. Unlike most novels, The Scholars doesn’t focus on one individual or family; instead, it’s like a long-distance relay race; a protagonist or two will dominate a few chapters, then pass the narrative baton on to a hitherto minor character, who will then amble with it for a few chapters before passing it on to the next protagonist. They are unified not by family but by their relationship to the exam system, and while an occasional character from an early chapter might reappear later, most are left behind as the author dramatizes a new generation’s struggle with the system. This is the first of the novel’s many innovations, and one of its challenges: there are about 60 principal characters and twice as many minor ones to keep track of over a century’s time, and you never know which bystander in one chapter will emerge as the protagonist of the next. The unpredictable structure and casting are emblematic, and later Qinq novelists were the first to applaud Wu’s marriage of form and content: “its episodic structure,” Shang Wei explains, “which permits a broad coverage of various and often unrelated social circles and locales, fueled their fin-de-siècle imagination with the vision of a shattered world that has lost its center of gravity and cohesion.”39 The first section comes to a climax of sorts when a man named Tu Shen-ching, who is not too fond of the ladies—“I assure you, they affect me so painfully, I can smell a woman three rooms away!”—sponsors a contest for actors who specialize in women’s roles, held in a pavilion on Carefree Lake. A gay old time is had by all.
In marked contrast, chapters 31–37 deal with Tu’s cousin Shao-ching, “a true gentleman of the old school” (31), whom critics consider an autobiographical portrait of Wu himself. Generous to a fault, he gives his money away to anyone who asks, and keeps company not with transvestite actors but with Dr. Yu Yu-teh, the most virtuous Confucian in the novel. In chapter 37 they establish a temple in honor of Tai Po, a legendary Confucian sage who forsook wealth and fame for a simpler life. Chapters 38–54 feature another cavalcade of characters, not all of them scholars, but each supplying a case study in applied ethics, most falling short of Confucian ideals. How short? chapter 54 concludes with an ugly squabble between a pimp and his ho.
In the prefatory first chapter, set in the 14th century, the author states on the first page that most people waste their lives pursuing “riches, rank, success, and fame,” then introduces a simple man named Wang Mien to serve as his ideal. (Wang was a historic figure who died in 1359.) He’s modest, self-taught, and turns down an opportunity for political office to live and die as a hermit instead. Shown the new decree establishing the examination system, he warns, “These rules are not good. Future candidates, knowing there is an easy way to high position, will look down on real scholarship and correct behaviour.” Wu then parodies the opening chapter of The Water Margin as Wang watches the stars of the constellation “The Scholars” fall to the earth and predicts, “The stars have been sent down to maintain the literary tradition. But we shan’t live to see it” (1). But Wu saw it, and after dramatizing for nearly 600 pages how scholars degraded the literary tradition, he adds an epilogue set in 1595, introducing us to four more exemplary characters—a calligrapher, a go player, a painter, and a musician—who live modest lives in the manner of Wang Mien (and Wu himself).40 The painter and a neighbor decide to visit the Confucian temple erected some 50 years earlier by virtuous Tu Shao-ching and Yu Yu-teh, only to find “the main hall of Tai Po’s temple with the front half of the roof caving in. Five or six children were playing football beside the double gate, one half of which had fallen to the ground. Going in, they came upon three or four old women, who were picking shepherd’s purse in the temple courtyard. All the lattice-work in the hall had disappeared, and the five buildings at the back were completely stripped—not even a floor plank was left” (55). After a few more quiet, mournful pages, the novel ends.41
But The Scholars is not a caustic condemnation of society along the lines of The Plum in the Golden Vase or Marriage as Retribution. Wu’s “Litter of Literati” (as the title might be translated) and provincial posers make good copy, and the changes in cast every few chapters resemble a satiric stage revue—perhaps something Wu retained from his wasted youth among actors. (He used to write lyrics for their shows.) The novel is filled with comic incidents, sarcastic dialogue, and slapstick humor: a marriage ceremony is disrupted when a rat falls from the rafters into a bowl of soup, splashing the groom, followed a little while later by an airborne boot (propelled by a cook trying to kick some dogs), which likewise lands in soup; rubes embarrass themselves in the big city; various clever cons are pulled on people, one involving a pig’s head in a sack; a man is tricked into marrying a shrew, who in turn punishes the woman who arranged it by smearing her face with human feces; Tu Shen-ching is tricked into an assignation with an allegedly pretty Daoist priest who turns out to be a fat, 50-year-old slob, and when the prankster later relates this story to others, it “made them laugh so violently that they nearly choked” (33)—the response Wu hoped to get from his reader. There’s no doubting Wu’s serious concern with the decay in Confucian values and true scholarship, but The Scholars is a satire, not a sermon.
In addition to exposing the mundane foibles of human nature, Wu mocks the superstitious beliefs still prevalent in China in his time (and even today). An editor meets a tall, white-bearded man whom he takes at first to be a Daoist immortal, but as the next chapter title wryly informs us, “Ma Chun-shang attends the funeral of an immortal” (15), for it turns out the latter wa
s merely a conman/poet who had a manuscript he wanted to publish.42 We’re told of two scholars born on the same day and at the same hour, “yet their fortunes have been totally different—they have nothing at all in common!” a character exclaims. “This shows that astrology and horoscopy are unreliable” (17). Feng shui and fortune-telling are also exposed as scams, and an anecdote about a scheming monk who claims a cow was his father in a previous lifetime ridicules both Buddhism and transmigration in one comic swoop. But Wu’s attitude toward superstition/religion is puckish, not vicious, and he knows that there is only one true path to immortality: “You want several good scholars to write about your adventures,” advices a scholar named Wu Shu, “for their works will confer immortality on your loyal deeds and rescue them from oblivion” (40).
Equally enlightened is Wu’s attitude toward women, who were of course banned from taking the civil-service exams.43 Chapter 11 features a wife better qualified to take them than her dilettantish husband is, and other chapters feature women whose dedication to filial piety puts the male characters to shame. When Tu Shao-ching goes for a walk with his wife, holding her hand and roaring with laughter, everyone is “shocked and amazed” (33), for few men treated their wives as equals in public in those days. One scholar’s daughter named Shen Chiung-chih refuses to become a salt-merchant’s concubine (she thought she was slated to be his principal wife), so she runs away to Nanjing where she plans to sell her poems and needlework at Lucky Crossing Bridge. This independent young bohemian is of course taunted by some and assumed to be a prostitute. “Gaudily dressed” and wearing “her hair in the style of low-class women” (41), Chiung-chih harasses a crowd of ruffians, then discovers there’s a warrant out for her arrest (instigated by the salt-merchant), faces down a magistrate, punches out two guards—and then disappointingly passes the narrative baton on to a pair of real prostitutes and isn’t seen again. Other women behave as badly as men: an adventuress in chapter 54 uses sex to rob gullible men, and the novel ends with the story of Pin-niang, a talented but greedy courtesan whose customers are the “scholars” of Wu’s title.44
The relay-race narrative structure isn’t the only challenge for the first-time reader of The Scholars. Traditional Chinese criticism has a phrase meaning “directly narrating the incident itself without expressing one’s own judgment,” used often by one early commentator on The Scholars.45 Wu abandoned the traditional storyteller role of most Chinese narrators to simply relate what happens without authorial comment, relying on the reader to size up his characters based on what they do and say—typical of a modern novel, but a daring innovation on Wu’s part. But much of what they do and say is so culture-specific that a reader almost feels it necessary to bone up first on the Four Books and Five Classics to measure the characters’ Confucian quotient. In his fine mongraph Wu Ching-tzu, Timothy Wong quotes a brief dialogue between two scholars discussing the ethics of a bribe, then spends two and a half pages explicating their various errors of fact to reveal the depth of their stupid pedantry (55–57), which would have been apparent to Wu’s educated readers but not to us. (In this regard The Scholars resembles novels that belong to the Western tradition of learned wit.) While most of Wu’s scholars mangle and misuse their spotty education, his stand-in Tu Shao-ching demonstrates the proper use of scholarship in chapter 34 when he proposes new interpretations of two poems in The Book of Songs—both of which, not uncoincidentally, support his enlightened view of women.
It is for these reasons scholars with the necessary background in Chinese civilization rate Wu’s novel higher than a first-time Western reader might. C. T. Hsia, for example, praises The Scholars “for its revolutionary importance in stylistic and technical innovation and for the enormous influence it has exerted on the development of the Chinese novel,” specifically in avoiding the poetic discourse and clichés of earlier novels, in attempting “to liberate the novel from the fetters of popular religion,” in providing “the first satiric novel consciously written from the Confucian point of view,” for deploying “a revolutionary technique in character portrayal,” for his sympathetic treatment of “such lowly people as actors, prostitutes, and concubines” (which makes him “the first true humanitarian among Chinese novelists”), and for being “the first Chinese novelist to exhibit an introspective turn of mind.”46
All of these innovations give The Scholars a modernist feel. I was in the middle of reading it when I was asked to write a preface to a forthcoming Chinese translation of William Gaddis’s satiric novel J R (1975); struck by the similarities, I concluded my piece by suggesting Chinese readers of J R might be reminded of their Qing classic: Like Wu Jingzi, Gaddis states his theme on the first page (money), features a large cast of characters from all levels of society pursuing what Wu identifies on his first page as “riches, rank, success and fame” through multiple story-lines, abstains from authorial comment, relies heavily on the vernacular, and combines outrageous comedy with a mournful sense of civilization going to the dogs. Both authors also shared the idealistic hope that by pointing out society’s faults, society could reform itself, but both were smart enough to know that wasn’t going to happen. Not in 18th-century China, not in 20th-century America.
The trajectory of Wu Jingzi’s life—wealthy upbringing, descent into poverty, final years spent writing a long novel published decades after his death—is remarkably similar to that of his younger contemporary Cao Xueqin (W–G Tsao Hsueh-chin, 1715?–63), author of the greatest novel in Chinese literature. (That most of you have to read the next sentence to learn what that is speaks volumes about our cultural provincialism.) A Dream of Red Mansions (Honglou meng), aka The Story of the Stone (Shitouji), is a massive, 120-chapter novel whose place in Chinese culture is comparable, one Western critic suggests, to “a work with the critical cachet of James Joyce’s Ulysses and the popular appeal of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind—and twice as long as the two combined.”47 Or imagine a parallel universe where everyone reads Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the Western novel that most closely resembles A Dream of Red Mansions in size and sophistication.
The publication history of Cao’s novel is chaotic because, like Proust, he died while still revising it, leaving behind masses of manuscripts in various states of revision. (Coincidentally, they both died at about the same age, around 50.) The manuscript tradition suggests Cao finished writing the novel in 1754 after a decade’s work, and that he spent the next nine years revising and expanding it. During that time, family and friends helped with preparing his manuscripts (and sometimes hindered by losing them); two in particular, known by their pseudonyms Red Inkstone (Zhiyan zhai) and Odd Tablet (Jihu sou, or “The Old Crock”), copied and commented on the work in progress, making suggestions that Cao incorporated into his endless revisions. After Cao died in 1763 and Red Inkstone a few years later, it fell to Odd Tablet to prepare an authorized edition. (Bootlegs had already begun to appear based on circulating manuscripts.) The annotated version he brought out near the end of that decade was entitled The Story of the Stone but broke off after 80 chapters, though there were rumors of 120. Intrigued, a publisher named Cheng Weiyan spent much of the 1780s assembling what appeared to be the missing 40 chapters from booksellers and antiquarians, then asked his friend Gao E (1763–1816) to put them in order and harmonize them with the earlier 80 chapters. Their 120-chapter edition was published in January 1792 with the more evocative title A Dream of Red Mansions, one of a half-dozen titles Cao kicked around. Some early readers suspected that the concluding 40 chapters were a forgery on their part, a view held by some critics to this day. But over the last century others have come to believe their conclusion resembles what Cao must have left behind. There’s evidence of much editorial tampering throughout, beginning with Odd Tablet in the 1760s, but many have found the style of the final 40 chapters consistent with that of the first 80; in the 1980s a young critic did a computer-assisted statistical analysis of the 120-chapter text and concluded that it “is substantially a work
of single authorship.”48 Ten years later, however, Hsiao-jung Yu concluded, from the difference in the use of interrogatives and the absence in the last 40 chapters of Cao’s native Nanjing dialect, that the novel is a work of dual authorship. Thus the complete novel as we now have it “is a heavily-edited, somewhat imperfect amalgam of several different versions,” as one of Cao’s English translators admits, “the disiecta membra [scattered remains] of several different novels which no amount of editing can ever quite successfully reconcile one with another. . . . [Nevertheless] even in its unfinished and imperfect state his novel has had the power to entrance generations of readers and hold them in lifelong thrall.”49
About the novel’s title(s): In the dreamlike chapter 1, a heady mix of mythology, allegory, and metafiction, we are told the novel had different names at different stages: The Story of the Stone, The Tale of Brother Amor, A Mirror for the Romantic, A Dream of Red Mansions, and The Twelve Beauties of Jinling (an old name for Nanjing). The earliest English translations were entitled The Dream of the Red Chamber, but when David Hawkes published the first volume of his definitive translation in 1973, he went with The Story of the Stone. But in China (and elsewhere in translation), the title most often used means A Dream of Red Mansions, which is the title the Yangs chose for their English translation of 1978, and which I prefer even though I’ll mostly be quoting the superior Hawkes/Minford version.50 For red is the primary color of the novel—in fact the specialized study of Cao’s work is called Redology (Hongxue)—and the dream element is crucial. As to the literal meaning of Honglou meng, Hawkes explains in his introduction: “In old China storeyed buildings with red-plastered outer walls—this is the literal meaning of ‘hong lou’—were a sign of opulence and grandeur. . . . But ‘hong lou’ early acquired another, more specialized meaning. It came to be used specifically of the dwellings of rich men’s daughters, or, by extension, of the daughters themselves” (1:19). One playfully pedantic critic says a “pseudo-philological translation might be: Dreams in the Vermillion Red Second Story Loft Building Gynaeceum,”51 which might work in Kazakhstan if nowhere else. But for this richly symbolic novel I think it’s important to retain “dream,” “red,” and plural “mansions” (not the singular “chamber” of older translations), so A Dream of Red Mansions it is (acronymed DRM henceforth).