Naming the garden in The Story of the Stone - the pleasures of incomprehension

The older sister of Bao-yu, the boy, now a young teen, who was born with the jade stone in his mouth, is an Imperial Concubine, a high prestige slave of the Emperor.  She is likely herself still a teen when we learn, in Chapter 16 of The Story of the Stone, that she has been given permission to visit her family.  The family responds by planning an enormous party, thus the inventory of drapes and tablecloths I quoted two posts previously.  Thus the purchase of a dozen actors to perform a series of plays and musical numbers.  And thus the construction of a large, fantastic landscaped garden, full of adorable little pavilions and bridges and tiny “mountains.”

Two semi-digressions. 

First, all of this absurd expense is meant to, and does, as I understand it, pay off not just in prestige but in money, met or exceeded by gifts from the emperor.  The Buddhist fairy tale story floats in the background, but this is mostly a crass novel. 

Second, I do not want to say I understand the exact legal status of the Concubine, or those actors, who are definitely purchased, not hired, or of the many servants.  One servant openly discusses the possibility of returning to her own family if they could afford to buy her back, which they cannot.  She thinks her owners would just let her go free, forgoing payment, if she would just ask.  This is all quite interesting.

More artistically interesting, though, In Chapter 17, is a long scene where Bao-yu, his father and a bunch of lickspittle “literary gentlemen” tour the garden, assigning poetic names and epigrams to each rock and pavilion.  The father, who has barely been in the novel before, challenges Bao-yu to beat the scholars, then insults his son while secretly being proud of him.

“Yes,” said Bao-yu, “but [the classical allusions] are too contrived. ‘The Phoenix Dance’ is more fitting.”

There was a loud murmur of assent from the literary gentlemen.  [The father] nodded and tried not to look pleased.

“Young idiot! What can be expected of so feather-brained a creature?” (Ch. 17, 332)

We get this business eight times in twenty pages, at much greater length than the quotation suggests, almost exactly repeated: the feature is described, the literary gentleman provide names that are dismissed as terrible, and Bao-yu comes up with a better name and an accompanying couplet of poetry. My interest in this chapter was in its alien quality, in my complete lack of ground to judge what the heck was going on.  The Imperial Concubine visits in the next chapter, and its rituals – including a complete renaming of the garden features! – seemed just as arbitrary.

I was never really fussing over the “greatness” of The Story of the Stone, certainly not this early into the novel, but it is hard not to be curious, right?  Strong claims have been made, although I note that Kenneth Rexroth, who adored the novel, begins his Classics Revisited essay with “Its virtues are not as obvious. In fact, they are not obvious at all.”  Anyway, it was with the garden scenes that I realized how far I was from making any kind of judgment about the book.  It is, in parts, at least, much too strange.  I hope there are many more such parts.

I might contrast the Concubine’s visit with Chapter 21, which is set, more or less, in a teenage girls’ dormitory during a boring holiday, when even the servants, who are themselves teenage girls, have nothing to do.  There is some sexual friction as the story of the love triangle, or quadrangle including Bao-Yu’s chamber-wife, advances, but mostly the many characters spend the entire chapter getting on each other’s nerves.  An outstanding piece of psychological realism.  Honestly, it will take Western literature another 150 years to really discover the teenager as a psychologically distinct character.  Please see Colette’s Le Blé en herbe / Ripening Seed (1923) for a pioneering example.

The teenagers, massive numbers of servants in tow, have now moved into the fantasy garden.  My understanding is that much of the remaining two thousand pages of the novel takes place there.  One can visit a 32 acre replica of this garden, built in 1984, in Beijing (source of the Sun Wen painting up above).

Di at the Little White Attic happily put all of her many posts about The Story of the Stone, which she read in a Vietnamese translation, likely quite different than the book I read, in one place.

 

The Story of the Stone, fairy tale and realism - Not so wonderful, really, is it?

I left the characters of The Story of the Stone as they were buying drapes and tablecloths for a party.  I will rejoin the party planning momentarily.

The Story of the Stone is a massive domestic novel about an extended family.  The main plot is the teenage love triangle, but that story takes place among an enormous, sometimes baffling number of aunts, cousins, siblings, and servants, just an unbelievable number of servants.  Every teenage aristocrat has a complement of personal servants, many of whom are themselves major characters.

Anyone can become the protagonist for a chapter.  The structure often feels like that of a television drama, where each supporting character gets one feature episode per season.  At least that is how many dramas worked in the old days, the 1990s; how would I know how they work now.

The Story of the Stone is also a Buddhist fairy story.  It is at the same time a radically “realist” novel, innovative for Chinese fiction and nearly a century ahead of European fiction.  Yet it is also about a magical jade stone and the boy who was born with it in his mouth, the kind of Chosen One who is so popular in juvenile fiction today, but chosen for what, exactly?

The tension or mismatch between the stark domestic materialism of the novel and the dream-like fairy tale elements is unlike anything I have ever seen.  In a curious scene, the hero Bao-yu is visiting the family of Aroma, his chamber-wife (his servant and sexual partner – he is, what, 14 here, and she is 15?):

… she reached out and took the Magic Jade from his neck.

“Here’s something that will interest you all,” she said, holding it out to the others.  “You know how often you’ve spoken about that wonderful jade of Master Bao’s and said how much you’d give for a look at it?  Well, here it is!  Now you can look to your heart’s content.  There you are, that’s all it is!  Not so wonderful, really, is it?”

They passed it from hand to hand, and when it had gone full circle and all had examined it, she hung it once more around his neck.  (Ch. 19, 382)

Pure anti-climax.  What should be “wonderful” is just another bit of jewelry.  The jade does save Bao-yu’s life at the end of this first volume, when a magical monk last seen several hundred pages earlier uses it to remove a witch’s curse from Bao-yu and his mother.  I take, perhaps wrongly, the fortuitous appearance of the monk as part of the fairy story and the witch’s curse, purchased by an envious, villainous aunt, as part of the domestic realism.

As a sociological novel, a place to go for insight into Chinese culture, I have no doubt that The Story of the Stone deserves the label of “greatest.”  All of the little rituals and interpersonal relations, the hierarchies, the way the domestic world interacts with the outside world, the pettiness, the crass money-grubbing, the astounding clothes and furniture (the food is abundant but sadly not described) – of course all of this is highly interesting.  Is it artistically interesting, though?  One more post, back to the teenagers, back to that garden.

I borrowed another image from Wikipedia, this time one of a large album of scenes from the novel by late 19th century painter Sun Wen, one of those scenes where I wish I knew what they were eating. 

On the greatness of The Story of the Stone - it is in a vigorous, somewhat staccato style

Some notes on The Story of the Stone, Volume 1: The Golden Days (c. 1760 or maybe 1792) by Cao Xueqin, the first of the five volumes of the Penguin edition of the greatest Chinese novel.

I don’t like writing about a book before I have finished it, but in a sense I did finish a book, right, so why not.  I am keenly aware that the novel has another 94 chapters and two thousand pages to go.  Well, 92 chapters, since I have begun the second volume.

From this text, I would never guess that The Story of the Stone is the greatest Chinese novel or even guess the grounds on which the claim could be made.  I will expand on that a bit.

“To hear you talk, it doesn’t sound as if all your years of play-going have taught you much,” said Bao-chai.  “This is an excellent play, both from the point of view of the music and of the words.”

“I can’t stand noisy plays,” said Bao-yu.  “I never could.”

“If you call this a noisy play,” said Bao-chai, “it proves that you don’t know what you’re talking about…  That means, musically speaking, that it is in a vigorous, somewhat staccato style.  In fact the musical excellence of this piece goes without saying.  But apart form that, the libretto is good, too.”  (Ch. 22, 435)

All references are to the landmark 1973 David Hawkes translation.

The Story of the Stone is, in large part, a teenage love triangle set in a fairy garden, a so-called Young Adult romantasy.  The characters above, magically-born Bao-yu and the perfect Bao-chai, are two-thirds of the love triangle.  Aren’t they adorable, what with their literary criticism?  Tragically, although Bao-chai loves Bao-Yu, he loves the third side of the triangle.

What is “great”?  The Story of the Stone is written in the vernacular rather than classical register, and had a significant effect on literary Chinese language, perhaps, as I take it, like Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1827 / 1842) had on literary Italian.  All of this is invisible to me.

Visual artists have looted the novel for illustrations.  The characters and scenes are famous from paintings, prints, and film and television adaptations.  I assume comic books, too.  Potentially visible to me.  I should see if there is a book of artistic responses to the novel.  Please recommend if you know of such a thing.  The Wikipedia entry for The Story of the Stone has many interesting examples, one of which I borrowed, although it depicts a scene from the second volume of the translation.

Those are two objective reasons, a step removed from the text, for “great.”

Cao Xueqin’s language, as Hawkes writes it, is vigorous and somewhat staccato, often plain with lots of dialogue and minimal metaphor and scenes that would not be written so differently if they were in a play.  Descriptions are elaborate but reserved for clothing, furniture, and an extraordinary garden.  Descriptions often resemble, or are, lists.  Or inventories:

“Curtains, large and small, in various silks and satins – flowered, dragon-spot, sprigged, tapestry, panelled, ink-splash: one hundred and twenty. – Eighty of those were delivered yesterday. That leaves forty to come. – Blinds: two hundred. – Yes.  They all arrived yesterday. But then there are the special ones. – Blinds, scarlet felt: two hundred.  Speckled bamboo: one hundred. [skipping more kinds of bamboo] – Chair-covers, table-drapes, valances, tablecloths: one thousand two hundred of each” (17, 333)

Not the sort of prose I call great, yet I read this particular chapter with fascination.  But look how long I am running.  More tomorrow.  The garden, the poetry, and more teenagers in love.  “Each night I ask the stars up above / Why must I be a teenager in love?”  That is Dion, not Cao Xueqin, although it would make a good epigraph for The Story of the Stone.

How Ivan Bunin and Vasily Grossman spent the war - He was in the countryside then for the last time in his life

Without planning it I recently read three books by Russian writers from three different strands of Russian literature: Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur (1929 /1972, tr. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler) in the Gogolian and Dostoyevskian strand, Ivan Bunin’s Dark Avenues (1943/1946) following Turgenev and Chekhov, and A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army (2005, ed. and tr. by Anthony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova) for a Tolstoyan.  I will save Chevengur for later.  The Bunin and Grossman books, however different, had one interesting thing in common.  They were both documents of how these great writers spent World War II.

Grossman spent the war becoming the greatest Soviet war correspondent, and also it turns out acquiring the experience and subject matter to become a great novelist.  A Writer at War would be of the highest interest – the Soviet war from the perspective of an outstanding journalist – if Grossman had never written Life and Fate, but this book would likely not exist without the later novels. 

Surprisingly, the text of A Writer at War is mostly not his published journalism, too filled with propaganda, but rather excerpts from his journals, filled with things that would have gotten him sent to the gulag or worse, whatever his fame, if the wrong people had known he was recording them.  A good chunk of the text, maybe 30%, is actually by the historian Beevor, providing the big picture and tying Grossman’s pieces together. 

As the Soviet army advances, Grossman also becomes a pioneering journalist of the Holocaust.  “The Road to Treblinka” (1944), an early masterpiece, if that is the right word, of its kind is excerpted in A Writer at War, although it is worth reading it in full in The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays (2010) if you can stand it, and no judgment from me if you cannot.

Ivan Bunin, in his early seventies, spent the war in southern France, impoverished, helping other Russian émigrés and prisoners as best he could, the 1933 Nobel money long gone, distributed to charities.  He also spent the war writing love stories, three dozen love stories, sensual, nostalgic, sad, beautiful.

Here is the first paragraph of “An Emerald,” a page-long story about a young couple’s attempt to articulate love:

The nocturnal dark-blue blackness of the sky, covered in quietly floating clouds, everywhere white, but beside the high moon pale blue.  If you look closely, it isn’t the clouds floating, it’s the moon, and near it, together with it, a star’s golden tear is shed: the moon glides away into the heights that have no end, and carries the star away with it, ever higher and higher.  (69)

That first sentence is ur-Bunin.  Colors upon colors, even “blackness” modified by another color.  The shorter pieces, sometimes only half a page, are close to prose poems.  “Her lips moving over her white teeth were blue-grey, the bluish down of her upper lip thickened above the corners of her mouth” (245), from “The Camargue,” a page of male gaze with only a hint of story at the end.

Longer stories are more in the line of Turgenev.  Lots of First Love.  But Dark Avenues is a “theme and variations” book, so there is a little bit of everything, jaded lovers, affairs that end in renunciation or violence.  They always end.  I think that is true.  The time is almost always before the Revolution, but not always.  One story, but only one delicate tale of young love, ends like this:

This was in February of the terrible year of 1917.  He was in the countryside then for the last time in his life.  (“Tanya,” 115)

This story is followed by “In Paris,” with the Revolution in the distant past.  There are lots of little connections between the stories.  The end of “In Paris” may be too sad to quote.

Some other last sentences:

Returning to his room, he lay down on the couch and shot himself in the temples with two revolvers. (15)

I don’t remember anything else.  There was nothing else… (183, ellipses in original)

He was beaten with lashes and sent to Siberia, to the mines.  (205)

In some sense Dark Avenues is a relentlessly miserable book.  In other senses, not.  It is an erotic book, explicit for its time, much more so than anything allowed in the Soviet Union at this period since Stalin was something of a Puritan, forgive the anachronism, about sex in art.  Perhaps that was something of a political statement by Bunin.

I have been referring to the recent (2008) Hugh Alpin translation of Dark Avenues, the first English translation of the entire Russian collection.  I have read some of the stories in other collections by other translators, but the Alpin version is the place to go to try to see this masterpiece as a whole.

Books I read in September 2024 - Boring books had their origin in boring readers

My reading took an interesting Russian turn that I will write about, soon, tomorrow, there, I said it out loud so maybe I will really do it.

November is Norwegian month at Dolce Bellezza.  I will be joining her by reading at least the first novel, The Other Name (2019), of Jon Fosse’s Septology, and polar explorer Roald Amunden’s memoir My Life as an Explorer (1927).  Please join in the alliterative fun.

 

FICTION

The Mind of Mr J. G. Reeder (1925), Edgar Wallace – “The author of crime novels at one time so popular that every fourth book sold in Britain came from his pen” is how H. R. F. Keating introduces the extraordinary hack Edgar Wallace in Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books (1987, p. 31).  Can this possibly be true?  Exactly when, I wonder.  But it is true that although Agatha Christie won the war, Wallace won the early battles.  For a couple of decades in the detective novels of other writers, Edgar Wallace is the common reference, the mystery writer all of the characters apparently read, and the creator of all of the clichés that you won’t find in my novel, or if you do we can wink at them as deliberate Edgar Wallace stuff.

Wallace writes in a light, witty version of the 1920s British house style, simpler than Christie who is in turn simpler than Dorothy Sayers, not as funny as Wodehouse or Waugh, obviously, but with some good jokes in their line.  The crimes and solutions (this is a book of linked short stories) are nonsense but much more than those of many of his peers?  Not much more.  Easy, fun reading.

Passing (1929), Nella Larsen

Chevengur (1929/1972), Andrei Platonov – I’ll write about this one soon.  The quotation in the title is from Chevengur, p. 151.

Dark Avenues (1946), Ivan Bunin – This one, too.

The Remains of the Day (1989), Kazuo Ishiguro – For several years the contemporary writers who have attracted my attention have mostly been – see the next two books – conceptual art weirdos who are not necessarily trying to write great or perfect books.  But I still enjoy such things, like this one.  An intricate construction.  At times I almost – well, an experienced or jaded reader, I did not applaud or gasp, but I sure thought “Oh, good one, nicely done” or the equivalent.

Game of the Worlds (2000), César Aira

Half an Inch of Water (2015), Percival Everett – Short stories set in the Rocky Mountains.  Of a piece with his novels, except with more horses.

A Shining (2023), Jon Fosse – A single short story for some reason published as a book.  Minor.

 

POETRY

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (1948-62), Derek Walcott – Some apprentice work, I guess, absorbing the influence of many other poets, but getting darn good by the end (meaning 1962).  Who knows when I will follow Walcott into the 1960s and 1970s.

O Lovely England and Other Poems (1952), Walter de la Mare – His last poetry book, barely distinguishable from his first in 1902.  Fifty years of lovely England, lovely poetry.

Collected Poems (1953-85), Elizabeth Jennings – A British Catholic in the quadrant with Auden and Larkin, maybe.  “Art is not self-expression while, for me, ‘confessional poetry’ is almost a contradiction in terms” (13).  Lots of interesting poems about paintings and music, and, sadly, mental asylums.

Sonnets for a Missing Key and some others (2024), Percival Everett

 

ADVENTURE AND JOURNALISM

The Royal Road to Romance (1925), Richard Halliburton – Fresh out of Princeton, young Halliburton begins what will become a round the world tour.  His tramp through Europe has me wondering why I was reading this trivial book, but it gets more interesting once he gets to India, and his enthusiasm, his love of the “romance” of pure movement, never stops.  I am reading another book about a tramp across Europe just a few years later, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Time of Gifts (1977), and they are opposites, in style, purpose, and tone.  Halliburton’s book may now be more interesting as part of the history of travel writing, the creation of the celebrity traveler, now I assume found on Instagram, than for its own sake.

A Writer at War (2005), Vasily Grossman – Another I will write a bit about separately, I swear.

 

FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE

Coral (1950), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen – Sophia’s mythological seashore poems take a dark turn in her third book.

Pedra Filosofal (1950), Jorge de Sena – Abstract compared to Breyner Andresen, and more difficult for the poor language learner.

O Cavaleiro da Dinamarca (1964), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen – The Knight from Denmark, a peculiar children’s novella which gives a little tour of European culture.  Portuguese children learn about Giotto and Dante and so on.  An oddity.  The other children’s books I have read of Breyner Andresen – and bless her, the Portuguese language learner says, for writing them – were about little children having magical adventures.

Mes Cahiers (1941), Colette – My Notebooks, a wartime scrapbook dump, of most interest for stories featuring early versions of her Cheri character.  But then there is some travel writing from the 1920s that is exquisitely written, almost abstract assemblages of form and color.

La Douleur (1985), Marguerite Duras – More notebooks, which the older Duras says she does not remember writing, about the events of the end of the war in Paris, like waiting for loved ones to return from camps, or the Resistance punishing collaborators.  Of high interest for the subject matter.  In English as The War.