by Steven Moore
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting and forever young.
Call his attitude naive, romantic, nostalgic, immature, even misogynistic, it’s an attitude that perhaps men hold more often than women. Alexander Theroux complains in Laura Warholic that women “unidealistically leave their girlhood behind them without so much as a single glance back, whereas men fondly, even if fatuously, keep looking back at the vanishing point and wondering whither the snows of yesteryear” (187). Call this attitude what you will, but it resulted in one of the loveliest paeans to girlhood ever written.
As he set out to redeem his wasted life by rescuing from oblivion the girls of his youth, Cao Xueqin also decided to redeem the Chinese novel from conventionality. When Vanitas criticizes the stone’s story for lacking a historical setting and “examples of moral grandeur among its characters—no statesmanship, no social message of any kind”—that is, for not resembling the typical Chinese novel—the insulted stone blasts him for being “obtuse” and defends his modern innovations: “In refusing to make use of that stale old convention [a historical setting] and telling my Story of the Stone exactly as it occurred, it seems to me that, far from depriving it of anything, I have given it a freshness those other books do not have” (1). Indeed, the novel’s modern setting, psychological depth, confessional mode, and metafictional self-consciousness are revolutionary. The stone goes on to deliver a page-long denunciation of conventional fiction—trashy historical novels, erotica, and especially the popular scholar–beauty romances—and claims his novel is more realistic, features round characters rather than flat stereotypes, and avoids “the stilted, bombastic language” of most novels. His objections to conventional novels are seconded by the matriarch of the novel, Grandmother Jia. In chapter 51 she mocks the clichéd plots of most plays and novels and castigates their authors for the “underlying falseness” of their stories:
“There’s always a reason for it,” the old lady went on. “In some cases it’s because the writer is envious of people so much better off than himself, or disappointed because he has tried to obtain their patronage and failed, and deliberately portrays them in this unfavourable light as a means of getting his own back on them. In other cases the writers have been corrupted by reading this sort of stuff before they begin to write any themselves, and, though totally ignorant of what life in educated, aristocratic families is really like, portray their heroines in this way simply because everyone else does so and they think it will please their readers. I ask you now, never mind very grand families like the ones they pretend to be writing about, even in average well-to-do families like ours when do you ever hear of such carryings-on? It’s a wonder their jaws don’t drop off, telling such dreadful lies!” (54)
The girls Cao vowed to memorialize deserved something better than this, as do intelligent readers, and he found better models in classic plays, specifically Wang Shifu’s paradigm-shifting Story of the Western Wing (Xixiang ji, c. 1300), a lively romantic comedy that broke many of the rules of Chinese dramaturgy, and Tang Xianzu’s Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting, 1598), a supernatural dream-play, which like The Western Wing is much longer and more complex than most Chinese plays. Cao pays tribute to both in chapter 23 of his novel: when Bao-yu’s servant notices his young master is bored, he visits a book-stall and returns with some erotic novels and playbooks. Like any 13-year-boy, Bao is momentarily startled by the porn, but abandons them for The Western Wing, which Dai-yu catches him reading. (During this period Bao-yu should be studying the Confucian classics, not reading novels and plays—girly stuff.) Asked to see his book, Bao warns (as though it were porn):
“ . . . if I do let you look, you must promise not to tell anyone. It’s marvellous stuff. Once you start reading it, you’ll even stop wanting to eat!”
He handed the book to her, and Dai-yu put down her things and looked. The more she read, the more she liked it, and before very long she had read several acts. She felt the power of the words and their lingering fragrance. Long after she had finished reading, when she had laid down the book and was sitting there rapt and silent, the lines continued to ring on in her head.
“Well,” said Bao-yu, “is it good?”
Dai-yu smiled and nodded.
Later in the same chapter, Dai-yu overhears the Jia family’s troupe of child actresses rehearsing a scene from The Peony Pavilion and marvels “there is good poetry even in plays. What a pity most people think of them only as entertainment” (23). The novel is filled with critical discussions of poetry, plays, novels, operas, landscaping, and painting: one of Bao’s girl friends is engaged in a large-scale painting of their garden, an analog for the novel itself. “Through it all,” Plaks notes (reminding us again of Ulysses), “we also discern the familiar voice of the learned man of letters flaunting his erudition and his urbane wit in a whole series of parodies, allusions and special effects—thereby giving a knowing wink to the connoisseurs of literati fiction who are accustomed to reading between the lines of fictional narrative, as much for the display of learning and literary refinement as for the orchestration of plot, character and sentiment” (119). And through it all the author makes clear distinctions between innovative art (like his) and conventional entertainment, leaving no doubt which side he’s on.
There is some doubt, however, which side he’s on sexually.59 While Chinese readers consider Bao-yu and Dai-yu an archetypal romantic couple, jaded Western readers are apt to be reminded less of Romeo and Juliet than of Marcel and Albertine, knowing the latter was a beard for Proust’s love for Albert Nahmias and especially Alfred Agostinelli. Cao sows examples of Bao-yu’s gender confusion everywhere: at his first birthday, when various objects were placed around him to ascertain his future career, baby Bao “stretched out his little hand and started playing with some women’s things—combs, bracelets, pots of rouge and powder and the like—completely ignoring all the other objects” (2). At age 10 he is quoted as saying, “Girls are made of water and boys are made of mud. When I am with girls I feel fresh and clean, but when I am with boys I feel stupid and nasty” (2). Bao-yu gives every indication he wishes he had been born a girl, and expresses shame at being trapped in a boy’s body. When he first meets Dai-yu, he throws a hissy fit: “ ‘None of the girls has got one,’ said Bao-yu, his face streaming with tears and sobbing hysterically. ‘Only I have got one. It always upsets me. And now this new cousin comes here who is as beautiful as an angel and she hasn’t got one either, so I know it can’t be any good’ ” (3). Translator Hawkes slyly remarks, “I do not think the fact that he is actually referring to his jade talisman makes this passage psychologically any the less interesting” (1:32 n8).
At school Bao-yu becomes best friends with sexy Qin-shi’s younger brother Qin Zhong, “whose painful bashfulness created a somewhat girlish impression” (7), and they hook up with another delicate pair of lads known as Darling and Precious. Ugly rumors fly about this foursome, which our author neither confirms nor denies. Bao and Qin Zhong later stay for a few days at the Water-moon Priory, where the latter falls for a nun. One night as those two begin having sex, Bao-yu sneaks up on them and climbs aboard, then promises not to tell on them. “Wait until we are both in bed and I’ll settle accounts with you there,” he tells Qin Zhong. After a relative relieves him of his jade for safety (rendering him female per earlier symbolism), the narrator winks: “As for the ‘settling of accounts’ that Bao-yu had proposed to Qin Zhong, we have been unable to ascertain exactly what form this took; and as we would not for the world be guilty of a fabrication, we must allow the matter to remain a mystery” (15). Qin Zhong unexpectedly dies in the next chapter, and Bao-yu weeps bitterly at the loss of his first intimate companion. (Throughout this sequence there are several references to an openly gay relative named Xue Pan, whose camp romps with pretty boys are a family joke.) Later Bao-yu becomes entangled with a female impersonator named Bijou, which earns him a vicious beating at the hands of his father, and later yet, an older woman tries
to rape him and he flees like a frightened virgin. His female companions treat him as one of the girls—never for a moment seeing him as a sexual threat, despite their isolation in the garden—and finally, we are told that after he’s tricked into marrying Bao-chai, he puts off consummating the marriage as long as he can. Adding to the gender confusion are several female characters, most notably his married (but childless) cousin Wang Xi-feng, who (like her) have masculine names and tendencies, and the fact that the Jia “family’s fall is largely the result of many of its male members’ . . . failure to do their ‘male’ duties.”60 (It’s significant the novel opens with the goddess Nu Wa repairing a hole in the sky caused by a male demon.) Mix in the novel’s lesbians, tomboys, transvestites, and role-switching actors and you have a work that cunningly questions gender assumptions and the marginalization of women in patriarchal China.
Thus it’s easy to queer the Dream and read Bao-yu’s final decision to abandon conventional society for monkhood as a liberating coming-out story to pursue his own sexual identity. The stone rejected by Nu Wa felt ashamed of not fitting in with the straight-cut stones, and we last seeing Bao-yu running off with the disreputable Buddhist and Daoist singing a song (if not a show tune). But it’s more likely the author intended to portray sexuality as yet another paradox, where gay and straight are as difficult to separate as real and unreal, original and double, history and fiction, dream and reality. Given Bao-yu’s affinity for the arts, there is a more fruitful way to read his unconventionality.
Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young is a fictionalized account of how he came to write that novel; its protagonist, it can be inferred, will go on to write Ulysses. Proust’s massive novel is another autobiographical account of how an author found his calling; it ends with Marcel ready to write the novel we’ve just read. Both Joyce and Proust were individualists who had to separate themselves from conventional society before they could create great art, the Irishman to the continent and the Frenchman to a cork-lined room. In his autobiographical protagonist, Cao Xueqin created a similar portrait of the artist as a young man, a fanciful mythification of how he himself became a writer. (In addition to painting, he was an accomplished poet before turning to the novel; DRM is filled with dozens of poems in challenging forms.) Bao-yu’s stern, conventional father is constantly disappointed in his son’s lack of progress in his studies; in the same chapter 23, he berates Bao-yu in front of his mother: “he is fundamentally incapable of caring about serious matters and preoccupies himself with poetic trivialities and other such airy-fairy nonsense as a substitute for solid learning.” Bao and the girls start a poetry club, and while his initial efforts are weaker than theirs—especially Dai-yu’s self-dramatizing laments—he improves as a poet over the course of the novel. In later chapters, he turns to poetry to memorialize his feelings; in chapter 78, for example, after Bao’s maid Skybright dies of tuberculosis, he writes an elegy for her—inspired, it must be admitted, by some airy-fairy nonsense another maid feeds him about meeting Skybright in the form of a hibiscus spirit. As he plans his work, we can overhear what Cao Xueqin must have been thinking at the genesis of DRM: first, he tells himself, it’s unimportant that he’s writing about a mere maid rather than a storybook heroine:
It’s not the value of the objects that counts, but only the heart’s sincerity and reverence. That’s the first thing.
And secondly, the eulogy and elegy must be original too and unconventional. It’s no good following the beaten track and padding the writing with high-sounding phrases; one should shed tears of blood, making each word a sob, each phrase a groan. It’s better to show grief and to spare, even if that makes for an unpolished style. At no cost must genuine feeling be sacrificed to meretricious writing. Besides this was deprecated by many of the ancients too—it’s not a new idea of mine today. Unfortunately, men today are so keen on official advancement that they have completely discarded this classical style, for fear of not conforming to the fashion and damaging their chances of winning merit and fame. As I’m neither interested in rank or honour, nor writing something for others to read and admire, why shouldn’t I follow the style of such poetic essays as The Talk of the Great, Summoning the Soul, The Lament and The Nine Arguments of the ancient Chu people, or The Withering Tree, The Queries, The Autumn Flood and Life of the Great Gentlemen?61 I can intersperse the writing with solitary phrases or occasional short couplets, using allusions from real life as well as metaphors, and writing whatever I feel like. If merry, I can write playfully; if sad, I can record my anguish, until I’ve conveyed my ideas fully and clearly. Why should I be restricted by vulgar rules and conventions?” (78)
The maiden result of this defiant declaration of artistic independence is a six-page fantasia mixing prose and poetry that elevates Bao’s ex-maid to goddess status; after he reads aloud his invocation to her spirit in the garden, he is approached by what appears to be Skybright herself but turns out to be Dai-yu, who makes fun of its extravagance and helps him revise a few lines. But Dai-yu realizes this elegy could apply to her as well: she too is associated with the hibiscus and like Skybright she will die soon from tuberculosis. When Bao-yu learns in chapter 98 of Dai-yu’s death, however, he doesn’t write anything; as Anthony Yu notes, “the pain of Dai-yu’s memory, for Bao-yu, defies and defeats poetic language.”62 True, but perhaps he is simply biding his time: his ethereal soul-mate, his sad fairy flower, deserves something grander than a six-page elegy. “For another person I might have been content with something uninspired,” he tells Aroma. “But for Dai-yu nothing but the very purest and the very best will do” (104). Given the novel’s overtly autobiographical and metafictional nature (which Yu so brilliantly elucidates), it isn’t too farfetched to imagine that Bao-yu eventually writes the 2,500-page Dream of Red Mansions for her.
That, at any rate, is how I read the novel’s conclusion: Bao’s renunciation of society to become a Buddhist monk is a parable for Cao Xueqin’s decision to become what Stephen Dedalus calls “a priest of art,” and the Buddhist Land of Illusion is yet another name for the timeless realm of art, a world more real and hospitable to eccentrics like Bao-yu than the mundane world of conventional folks. For them, Cao Xueqin painted rocks; for himself and his friends, he dreamed up a talking stone that gave us the greatest novel in Chinese literature, and one of the greatest in the world.
The towering Dream of Red Mansions is the high point of Chinese fiction, unsurpassed to this day, so it’s not surprising that few significant novels emerged from its long shadow. Dozens of inferior sequels and imitations followed—most rewriting it with a happy ending—but nothing of consequence.63 During this time, one genre of fiction that made considerably fewer demands on the reader than DRM became popular, namely tanci, prosimetric romance novels written by and for women. A cousin of scholar– beauty romances, they featured a female protagonist and point of view. The genre sounds like syrupy escapist fare, and I’m not aware of any translations, but one tanci stands out: Zaisheng yuan (Destiny after Rebirth) by Chen Duansheng (1751–96). She began the novel while still a teenager, set it aside until around 1784 when she wrote a few more chapters, but then left it unfinished. (Years later a writer named Liang Desheng added three chapters to conclude it, and it was published in 1821). “To avoid an unwanted marriage forced upon her by the emperor,” its heroine, Meng Lijun, “escapes from her home, puts on men’s clothing, passes the imperial examinations (a male privilege only), and becomes the prime minister.” Qian Ma (who I have just quoted) makes it sound like a daring, subversive work and worthy of translation.64
At the other end of the fiction spectrum, another genre flourished during this time that made even greater demands on the reader than DRM, one critics now call the scholarly novel: erudite works written by “men who utilized the form of a long narrative not merely to tell a story but to satisfy their needs for all other kinds of intellectual and literary self-expression.”65 Following the example of Wu Jingzi’s Scholars, the genre includes Li Baichuan�
�s Lüye xianzong (Footsteps of an Immortal in the Mundane World, 1762), Li Lüyuan’s Qiludeng (Lantern at the Crossroads, 1778), and Tu Shen’s Yinshi (History of a Bookworm, late 18th century). Unfortunately none of these has been translated, nor has the most extreme example of the genre:
The last major novel of the 18th century, and the longest novel in Chinese literature, is Yesou puyan (The Humble Words of an Old Rustic, c. 1780), a 154-chapter novel (which would run almost 4,000 pages in English) by an eccentric Confucian scholar named Xia Jingqu (1705–87).66 He was a strange man: though possessing vast erudition, he failed to pass the lowest entrance exams and lived in poverty. (His novel wasn’t published until a century after his death.) A high-minded adherent of muscular Confucianism (as opposed to DRM’s effete Buddhism), the novel indicates he was obsessed with kinky sex and female genitalia. Daria Berg wrestled this gigantic dragon of a novel into the following compact summary:
The action is projected back into the mid-Ming era. Many details and events in the novel are autobiographical but the male protagonist, Wen Su-ch’en, a child prodigy and Confucian polymath, succeeds in the imperial examination system, attains high rank, and is singled out for special imperial honors. This Confucian superhero is also endowed with magic powers, physical prowess, and sexual potency. He manages a household of two wives, four concubines, and a multitude of sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons, as would have befitted an emperor. His mother reaches an old age and, as a sage Confucian matriarch and chaste widow, she too receives imperial honors. A Confucian moralist, Wen Su-ch’en sets out to eradicate heterodoxy. He conquers evil monsters, subdues rebellious monks and eunuchs, and wins the emperor’s confidence. He succeeds not only in eliminating Buddhism and Taoism in China but also in subjugating Europe and converting it to Confucianism. (670)