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.