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.