by Steven Moore
Now: let’s quickly deal with the novel’s Gone with the Wind appeal to get to the more interesting Ulysses parallel.
DRM is a romantic tragedy set against the decline of an aristocratic Beijing family in the early 18th century, and the coming-of-age story of a rather strange boy. Shortly after attaining puberty, the pampered heir Jia Bao-yu meets his cousin Lin Dai-yu, a smart, delicate orphan two years younger;52 they recognize each other as soul-mates fated to be in love, though they spend most of their time bickering. (Like some women, Dai-yu not only is regularly disappointed that Bao-yu doesn’t have the psychic ability to read her mind and anticipate how she will react to the nuances of words and actions, but also possesses an elephantine memory for past lapses.) Dai-yu is only one of many girl cousins and maids with whom the effeminate Bao-yu spends all his time, a refined existence mostly spent in the Jia family’s elaborate garden, where the kids have their own separate cottages. Around age 17 Bao-yu is tricked by his family into marrying a different cousin—the sensible Confucian conformist Bao-chai—and on their wedding night, Dai-yu dies from consumption, convinced Bao-yu has betrayed her and cursing him with her dying breath. This sends Bao-yu into a catatonic stupor and long illness, and even after he recovers he’s never quite the same. Meanwhile, his family is experiencing financial problems and falls under Imperial disfavor, losing many of its assets. Bao-yu’s female playmates begin dispersing: some die, or marry, one takes take the veil, and one (in a sensational chapter) is kidnapped and raped. Reluctantly fulfilling his filial duties, Bao-yu impregnates his wife and passes the civil-service exam with distinction—providing the family with an heir and restoring some of its reputation—but then disappears to become a Buddhist monk, convinced that love and social success are illusory.
Although the pace is glacial by Western standards and the huge cast (some 500 characters) is hard to keep track of, DRM is an enchanting read. The principal characters are well-drawn, the conflicts of a large family realistically depicted, the sumptuous surroundings lovingly described, and there are enough plot twists and surprises to keep the reader turning its hundreds and hundreds of pages. It’s funny in parts, and includes a wide range of characters from the emperor down to thieves and actors; women dominate the novel—they are smarter and more talented than most of the men—and the author’s empathy and insights into female psychology are deep and almost unprecedented. (It is perhaps the greatest feminist novel written by a man.) Bao-yu and the girls display all the charm and exuberance of precocious teens, along with the immaturity that attends grappling with first love. Bao-yu, like most boys that age, isn’t as emotionally mature as the girls, to their exasperation; Dai-yu is as touchy as a tigress with a toothache, and often comes across as “a self-centered neurotic who courts self-destruction,” as Hsia huffs.53 (Nowadays, Dai-yu would be a brainy goth girl with serious self-esteem issues.) It’s easy to see why the novel was popular in China from the start; as Shi Changyu notes in his introduction to the Yangs’ translation, in a feudal society where marriages were arranged by family elders with no regard for the children’s personal feelings, “the novel had a particularly profound effect on young people, with young women weeping, swooning and being driven almost to distraction while reading the poignant story of Bao-yu and Dai-yu. The tragedy of A Dream of Red Mansions resonated in the hearts of young people in feudal society . . . with the result that the guardians of feudal morality regarded the novel with horror and several times banned it or destroyed copies” (1:12). (It’s all very chaste, though; Bao-yu and Dai-yu never even kiss.) Although the events of the novel are largely confined to the domestic sphere and not set against an important historical backdrop (like the Civil War in Gone with the Wind), DRM is a sweeping romantic saga whose continued popularity in China is as well-deserved and understandable as that in this country for Margaret Mitchell’s novel (and its epic movie version).
Just as Joyce adapted the myth of Ulysses’ return to Ithaca to structure his huge novel, Cao Xueqin encloses his story within an elaborate Buddhist fairy tale. (Bear with me on this.) The novel opens in the mythic past as the mother goddess Nu Wa molded 36,501 building stones to repair a breach in the sky; only 36,500 are needed for the job (the number of days in a century), so she discards the extra stone on Greensickness Peak.54 Like the divine stone at the beginning of The Journey to the West, this stone becomes sentient and self-conscious: convinced it was rejected because of its unworthiness, the stone shrinks to the size of a pendant. It is discovered by a lame Buddhist monk and a scabby Daoist priest, two rather disreputable pimps for enlightenment who will turn up periodically throughout the novel. Recognizing its potential, the monk incarnates the stone as an aristocratic boy and sends him off to experience the human world. “Countless aeons” later, another Daoist whose name the English translator Latinizes Vanitas (Kongkong daoren, or “Reverend Void”) comes across a stone inscribed with a lengthy narrative: The Story of the Stone, which we are about to read. He reads it and—sounding like a modern editor—tells the stone that while this story “contains matter of sufficient interest to merit publication . . . I cannot see that it would make a very remarkable book” (1). Like any author defending his work, the stone accuses Vanitas of reading it superficially and explains his motives; Vanitas then rereads it and discovers that it is indeed remarkable and copies it out to find a publisher. This is Cao’s hint to readers that while his novel may appear to be merely a novel about “a number of females, conspicuous, if at all, only for their passion or folly or for some trifling talent or insignificant virtue” (as Vanitas complained after his first reading), its realism and psychological acuity make it far superior to conventional fiction. (Can a novel be called realistic that opens with a Chinese goddess creating a talking stone? That’s one of the many paradoxes of this subtle work.) The stone also hints this will be a work of metafiction; novels that contain an account of their origin are invariably about the process of literary creation.
The novel then begins again, in 18th-century Suzhou, by introducing a scholar named Zhen Shi-yin; he promptly falls asleep, and in the first of the novel’s many spectacular dream sequences he is approached by the Buddhist monk and Daoist priest, who provide the remainder of the novel’s backstory. Before the stone entered the human world, he attended the fairy Disenchantment at her Court of Sunset Glow. Out walking one day, the stone came across the beautiful Crimson Pearl Flower, which he brought to life with daily administrations of dew. The flower takes the form of an ethereal girl, who is so grateful to the stone that she decides to repay him not with dew but with “the tears shed during the whole of a mortal lifetime if he and I were ever to be reborn as humans in the world below” (1). Stone and flower will become Bao-yu and Dai-yu, fated soul-mates, and she will repay her “debt of tears” by dying young. (The fairytale logic here is a little hard to follow.) The stone is compressed to a piece of “precious jade” (the literal meaning of Bao-yu) and is found on the tongue of the baby born (reincarnated) into the Jia family circa 1715. It is inscribed with this couplet:
Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true;
Real becomes not-real where the unreal’s real.
—a reference to the “unreal” nature of the “real” world (per unworldy Buddhism) but also to the way fiction can be more real (truthful, insightful) than nonfiction when the fiction’s true (based on real events, as this novel was). At this point, Shi-yin awakes and we are once again back in the “real” world of our “unreal” novel.
Only halfway through the first chapter, the reader’s head is spinning with these mythic schemes and mystifying paradoxes, so it’s fortunate the next few chapters continue in a more realistic vein. But in the dazzling chapter 5 we return to “The Land of Illusion” via another extended dream sequence. Now at the age of puberty, Bao-yu becomes drowsy at a party and takes a nap in the bed of a flirty relative, a sexy young wife named Qin Ke-qing (Qin-shi to her friends). In a dream, Bao-yu follows the flirt to a feminine realm where he (re)encoun
ters the fairy Disenchantment: “My business is with the romantic passions, love-debts, girlish heartbreaks and male philandering of your dust-stained, human world,” she tells him sadly (5). A personification of the illusion (or impossibility) of true love, Disenchantment periodically sends the souls of girls “down into the world to take part in the great illusion of life” (1), after which they return to her, brokenhearted but enlightened. Taking Bao-yu to her palace—though Disenchantment preaches the Buddhist ideal of nonattachment, her Land of Illusion is more like a Heartbreak Hotel for women—she allows him to look through “registers in which are recorded the past, present and future of girls from all over the world,” but since these are written in the form of enigmatic poems, he fails to make any sense of them. (He will later; as with Vanitas’s first encounter with the inscribed stone, Cao’s novel is a tutorial on how to read complex literature.) Bao-yu is then introduced to a number of fairy maidens, a dozen of whom perform an oratorio called “A Dream of Red Mansions,” which foretells the sad fates of his girl-companions in waking life, but again the allegorical lyrics are too baffling for him to understand. To cure him of desire (qing: more broadly, attachment to the sensual world), Disenchantment then leads our boy to a bedroom occupied by a fairy girl: “Her rose-fresh beauty reminded him strongly of Bao-chai, but there was also something about her of Dai-yu’s delicate charm” (5); that is, she combines the best features of the two later rivals for his affections, but this fairy also happens to be named Ke-qing, same as the woman whose bed Bao-yu is dreaming in. Disenchantment gives Bao-yu some sex tips and pushes him at the compliant fairy. Coy Cao then tell us: “Dazed and confused, Bao-yu nevertheless proceeded to follow out the instructions that Disenchantment had given him, which led him by predictable stages to that act which boys and girls perform together—and which is not my intention to give a full account of here” (5).55 In “real” life, of course, what we have here is a boy at puberty experiencing his first wet dream, but in the Buddhist scheme of things, this is supposed to enlighten him to the emptiness of the sensual world. Fat chance. After Bao wakes, his maid Aroma notices his semen-stained trousers, much to his embarrassment, but he quickly gets over it and repeats the dreamy experience with her. A year or two older than Bao-yu, Aroma thus becomes his “chamber-wife,” but though she continues to serve him as a maid in the years that follow, there’s no further mention of sex between them.
The novel remains mostly in the material world thereafter, though occasional references to the Buddhist, the Daoist, and to Disenchantment remind us of the metaphysical superstructure behind the realistic action. There is also extensive use of mirrors and doubling to reinforce the difficulty of distinguishing between the real and unreal. In a daring move, Cao even provides our Jia Bao-yu of Beijing with a double named Zhen Bao-yu of Nanjing, whom he first meets in a dream before meeting him in real life, and who later becomes the model citizen our Bao will never be. (Zhen means “true” while jia means “false,” complicating matters further).
As the novel slowly progresses, it alternates between the rose-colored world of Bao-yu and the girls in their pleasure garden (modeled after the Land of Illusion) and the more conflicted world of the grownups next door in their red mansions. The kids’ dreamy existence is often punctuated with real dreams that are so insightfully symbolic that Cao seems to “have anticipated the findings of modern psychology,” as Hsia notes (275).56 The dream sequence in the 5th chapter is elegantly bookended by another one in the 5th chapter from the end (116), after the unhappily married Bao-yu is reminded of his previous existence as a stone and finally grasps the point Disenchantment had been trying to make. In a deep swoon, Bao-yu returns to the fairy realm, rereads the registers with greater comprehension, and re-encounters Dai-yu as a “Fairy Plant.” (Some of this may sound silly, but it is enchanting and even heartrending to read, believe me.) Upon waking, he is filled with a new resolve to discharge his social duties and detach himself from the world, aided by the return of the Buddhist monk. And in the concluding chapter 120, after the reader watches the 19-year-old Bao-yu disappear into a snowstorm, a full-blown mystic, we meet again the dreaming scholar Zhen Shi-yin from chapter 1, who summarizes this grand allegory of the “Magic Stone” and “Fairy Flower,” and we finally return to Greensickness Peak in the Land of Illusion, where Vanitas notices that new material has been added to the stone he had read earlier. Once again he ventures into the human world to find a publisher for the completed work, and in a shack in the suburbs of Beijing, he comes upon “a certain Mr Cao Xue-qin,” who genially agrees to see what he can do with it.
Just as Joyce didn’t need to believe in the historicity of the story of Ulysses to find it useful as an organizing structure, Cao didn’t necessarily believe in the Buddhist quest for enlightenment and possibly adapted it only as a recognizable course someone at odds with conventional society might take, a parable for a more private quest. As Plaks puts it, DRM “is at base an autobiographical exercise in the purgation of guilt: reliving the tragic fall of a proud family very much like his own, and shedding tears of remorse over his wasted years of youthful self-indulgence” (113). Like Bao-yu, Cao Xueqin was born into a wealthy family that fell apart in 1728 when its Nanjing estates were confiscated by the throne. Cao was 13 at the time—Bao’s age through much of the novel—and evidently had to stay with relatives in Beijing, never amounting to much after that. In later life he lived in abject poverty, barely surviving by selling rock-paintings and spending what little money he earned on wine. He certainly never became a Buddhist monk like Bao.57 Instead he led a bohemian life writing poetry, dabbling in theater, reading history books, and entertaining friends with witty talk: “discoursing of high, noble things while one hand hunts for lice,” as one of his friends put it.58 But he never forgot his privileged childhood, nor the charming girls he was privileged to spend it with. In one manuscript tradition, followed by the Yangs for their translation, the novel begins with this prefatory account of how DRM was written:
In writing this story of the Stone the author wanted to record certain of his past dreams and illusions, but he tried to hide the true facts of his experience by using the allegory of the jade of “Spiritual Understanding.” Hence his recourse to names like Zhen Shiyin [meaning “true facts concealed”]. But what are the events recorded in this book, and who are the characters? About this he said:
“In this busy, dusty world, having accomplished nothing, I suddenly recalled all the girls I had known, considering each in turn, and it dawned on me that all of them surpassed me in behaviour and understanding; that I, shameful to say, for all my masculine dignity, fell short of the gentler sex. But since this could never be remedied, it was no use regretting it. There was really nothing to be done.
“I decided then to make known to all how I, though dressed in silks and delicately nurtured thanks to the Imperial favour and my ancestors’ virtue, had nevertheless ignored the kindly guidance of my elders as well as the good advice of teachers and friends, with the result that I had wasted half my life and not acquired a single skill. But no matter how unforgivable my crimes, I must not let all the lovely girls I have known pass into oblivion through my wickedness or my desire to hide my shortcomings.
“Though my home is now a thatched cottage with matting windows, earthen stove and rope-bed, this shall not stop me from laying bare my heart. . . . Though I have little learning or literary talent, what does it matter if I tell a tale in rustic language to leave a record of all those lovely girls. This should divert readers too and help distract them from their cares.” (1:1–2)
That is, Cao’s motive was not to write a Buddhist “Intimations of Immortality,” but to immortalize the lovely girls he had known as a youngster, celebrating them when they were still girls and not yet women. Writing in the 1960s, Hsia noted that Bao-yu’s (and Cao’s) “secret wish is not unlike that of a much-admired adolescent hero in recent American fiction: to be a catcher in the rye and rescue all the lovely maidens from the brink of
custom and sensuality” (267). Throughout DRM, older women are portrayed as unlovely creatures, either worn-down and dispirited, or ambitious and conniving, or miserably married, or greedy, licentious, selfish, petty, or coarse. Near the middle of the novel Bao-yu is quoted as having once said, “A girl before she marries is like a priceless pearl, but once she marries the pearl loses its lustre and develops all sorts of disagreeable flaws, and by the time she’s an old woman, she’s no longer like a pearl at all, more like a boiled fish’s eye” (59), and among the novel’s largely female cast there are few women over 18 who don’t justify his observation. In addition to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Bao/Cao sounds like Peter Pan, scornful of adulthood, or better yet like Lewis Carroll, who lost interest in his girl chums once they grew up and got married. “People had to marry, of course,” Bao-yu realizes: “they had to reproduce their kind. But what a way for a lovely young girl to end!” (58). Given the way the author’s life turned out, it’s understandable the adult Cao would want to preserve that happy time when his family was still flush, to freeze himself at the age of 13 when he gloried “in the shadow of young girls in flower” (as the title of the second volume of Proust’s novel literally translates). Cao/Bao and the girls are like the figures immortalized on Keats’s Grecian urn,