Finishing The Story of the Stone - What a blessing this is, to return to the scene of my childhood dream!

How I wish all long novels were published in sensible multi-volume editions.  I have finished The Story of the Stone, 2,500 pages in five volumes, the last two translated by John Minford.  Cao Xueqin and his posthumous editor Gao E again share credit for authorship.  Chapters have become shorter and a few episodes seem abbreviated, but otherwise I have no sense of who did what.  Perhaps Minford smooths everything out for me.

In the last 22 chapters and 380 pages the novel necessarily narrows.  Necessarily if it is going to have an ending, which in this case it does.  A series of catastrophes strike the family began hitting the family at the end of the last volume, and they only accelerate.  Disgrace, crime, debt, deaths, so many deaths, some of them expected for a long time, some real surprises.  One shocked even jaded ol’ me.  There is some resemblance to the occasional contemporary event of the Chinese billionaire who suddenly falls from party favor and is arrested for corruption.

The garden, scene of so many teenage poetry games, is abandoned, a haunted ruin:

The Garden’s caretakers saw nothing to be gained by staying.  They all wanted to leave the place, and invented a whole series of incidents to substantiate the presence of diabolical tree-imps and flower sprites. (Ch. 102, 72)

In the next paragraph a minor character dies suddenly, perhaps as the result of sexual assault by one of those flower sprites, more monstrous than their name suggests.

Subplots resolve amidst the disasters and funerals.  Story elements abandoned for 2,000 pages return.  The architecture of this novel has some long, long arcs.  Eventually, the story narrows back to Bao-yu, the boy born with the jade stone in his mouth, who had “degenerated into a complete idiot” (109, 79) to the point where I was beginning to wonder how he could continue to function as a protagonist.  But the magical monk, seen rarely but at key moments previously, returns to take our away from the earthly plane into the Daoist fairy realm.  More or less.

“I know I’ve been somewhere like this before.  I remember it now.  It was in a dream.  What a blessing this is, to return to the scene of my childhood dream!” (116, 286)

Bao-yu is here in a complex dream chapter paralleling one that was well over 2,000 pages earlier, pulling together all of the major teenage female characters, dead and alive, like a last farewell to them before Bao-yu himself exits the novel just slightly ahead of the reader.

But not before he – I am giving away an important part of the story – so skip ahead if this bothers you – but seriously you probably want to know this one, it is so good – not before saving his family from disgrace by getting a high score on a test.

The Chief Examiner presented the successful candidates’ compositions to the throne, and His Majesty read them through one by one and found them to be well-balanced and cogent, displaying both breadth of learning and soundness of judgment…  His Majesty, as a consequence of this information, being a monarch of exceptional enlightenment and compassion, instructed his minister, in consideration of the family’s distinguished record of service, to submit a full report on their case.  (119, 351)

So most of the characters, if they made it this far, get a happy ending of one kind or another.  It is not so much that The Story of the Stone is the greatest Chinese novel but rather that it is the greatest Chinese novel.

“What is truth, and what fiction?  You must understand that truth is fiction, and fiction truth.” (103, 94)

This from another (or perhaps the same) magical monk.  The words “truth” and “fiction” are puns on the names of the two branches of the novel’s family.  Bao-yu is on the fiction side, and to the extent that Cao Xueqin is his double so is the author.  The great paradox of the novel, from beginning to end, is the contrast between the materialistic, dangerous “realistic” world of the adults with its budgets and corruption and the idyllic, fantastic world of the kite-flying, poetry-reciting teenagers in the garden, both ephemeral compared to Daoist eternity.  What then, was Cao Xueqin doing, who does not become a monk but rather writes a monumental realistic (and ant-realistic, and unrealistic) novel based on his early adolescent moment of happiness?  He finds an alternative immortality.

“So it was really all utter nonsense!  Author, copyist, and reader were alike in the dark!  Just so much ink splashed for fun, a diversion!”  (120, 375, almost the last words of the novel) 

The Story of the Stone, volume 4 - It was an eerie, desolate night.

At the two-thirds mark, after 80 chapters of the 120, three big changes hit The Story of the Stone (c. 1760 / 1791).  First, David Hawkes, the original translator of the Penguin edition, retires; John Minford finishes the job.  Second, the author of the novel, Cao Xueqin, dies, leaving a lot for textual scholars of the novel to do.  Are the last 40 chapters an edit of Cao Xueqin’s drafts, or maybe complete inventions by someone else, or something in-between?  The Penguin book, The Story of the Stone, Volume 4: The Debt of Tears, adds “edited by Gao E,” which is as far as I will go.  I have kept reading as if none of this matters.

The third change, though, which began in the last few chapters of the previous volume, is that the world of the novel is collapsing.  The beautiful teenage garden Arcadia can only last so long.  The “real,” adult world is having its problems – money trouble – but the true villain is time.  The characters age.  The teenagers become, tragically, marriageable.  The garden empties out; the idyll ends.

The novel becomes unbearably sad.  That is another way to describe the change.

A key character dies, with plenty of warning, but still.  The mood of the prose fits the event:

The wedding chamber was a long way off, and the guests heard nothing of the weeping, but from the Naiad’s House, in a brief interval of silence between their lamentations, they heard a faint snatch of music in the distance.  They strained their ears to catch it, but it was gone.  Tan-chun and Li Wan went into the garden to listen again, but all they could hear was the rustling of the bamboos in the wind.  The moonlight cast a wavering shadow on the wall.  It was an eerie, desolate night.  (98, 377)

If only more of the novel were written like this.

Cao Xueqin occasionally, not often but once in a while, uses time-shifted scenes, describing events in one location and then jumping back a bit to look at something happening simultaneously elsewhere in the garden.  The device is especially effective in this part of The Story of the Stone, where the author announces the death, an event of the greatest importance, in what is in a sense the wrong place, and then goes back to let us experience it in person.  Like Faulkner or what have you.  We are so used to this device now but it took a while for Western novelists to figure it out, Tristram Shandy’s herky-jerky line notwithstanding.

A number of other curious things are scattered through this chunk of the novel.  Another terrible double-suicide love affair, a compressed parallel to the best story in the previous volume.  A vendor brings the family some wonderful artifacts to sell, including a magnificent Mother Pearl that attracts other pearls to it, like a magnet.  A long digression on music and the playing of the qin, adding to the inventory of this novel about everything:

‘And before you think of playing, be sure to dress in a suitable style – preferably in a swansdown cape or other antique robe.  Assume the dignified manner of the ancients, a manner in keeping with the chosen instrument of the sages.  Wash your hands.’ (86, 154)

Seriously, before you do anything put on your swansdown cape and wash your hands. 

‘Do let’s put an end to this depressing conversation,’ said Jia She, ‘and have another drink.’ (92, 261)

One more volume to go.

The Story of the Stone, volume 3 - melodrama, drinking games, and "a convocation of bees and butterflies"

I am two-thirds through Cao Xueqin’s enormous The Story of the Stone (c. 1760), volume 3 of the David Hawkes translation, and the next twenty chapters have arrived at the library so I had better write this chunk up.

In this big middle section a number of minor or even new characters are given stories, making the structure even more episodic than previously.  Both the teenage love triangle and the Daoist fairy tale recede behind these new stories. 

The mysterious, magical Daoist monk makes just one appearance, in the middle of the best story as such so far (meaning in the first 1,800 pages), a hundred page novella about a young woman who becomes the secret second wife of the shallow, impulsive husband of one of the novel’s best characters, Wang Xi-feng, the woman who has managed the enormous household for over a thousand pages.  The secret comes out, and Xi-feng, a great Machiavellian, slowly but relentlessly destroys the new wife.  Along the way, the poor woman’s sister is also destroyed.  The novel known for its realism is interrupted by an outstanding, horrifying piece of melodrama, one part more fairy-tale like (thus the appearance of that monk), the other more of a domestic soap opera.  I was not surprised to learn that the story of these two sisters has often been detached from The Story of the Stone and adapted into operas and plays.

Immediately after this long, intense episode, the teens in their arcadian garden have a meeting of their poetry club which ends with them all flying kites.  Four full pages of pure kite flying.  “The cousins clapped their hands delightedly” (70, 392).  Me, too.  Some of the art of Cao Xueqin, some of the strong emotional effects, come from these big tonal shifts, the suicide of a teenager followed by poetry and kites.

Much of the substance of this volume is, like the previous, parties and planning for parties.  The theme of the decline of the family becomes more visible.  Budgets are tighter.  But the parties go on.  There is a long section full of Chinese drinking games, simultaneously too obscure:

Li Wan was to begin.

‘Gourd,’ said Li Wan.

‘Green,’ said Xiu-yan.

‘Green’ was evidently correct, since Li Wan appeared to be satisfied and the two women simultaneously sipped their wine.  (62, 200)

and too detailed, if there can be such a thing:

When she and Bao-chai had drunk, she threw the dice.  Twenty.  That meant that Aroma was to draw.  Aroma reached out and took a card.  (63, 228-9)

The unsupervised teens can really – realism! – put away the sauce.  Here a fifteen year-old girl has passed out on a bench:

She was covered all over from head to foot with crimson petals from the peony bushes which grew round about; the fan which had slipped from her hand and lay on the ground beside her was half buried in petals;; and heaped-up peony petals wrapped in a white silk handkerchief made an improvised pillow for her head.  Over and around this petalled monstrosity a convocation of bees and butterflies was hovering distractedly.  (62, 204)

I am really quoting this passage because it is so unusual in a novel where the materiality is more often expressed in lists of art objects or descriptions of clothing than in striking original images.  “Petalled monstrosity”!

Here’s another surprising bit from the end of the novel, another inset story about another jealous wife:

She was inordinately fond of gnawing bones, especially the bones of fowls.  To satisfy this craving she had ducks and chickens killed every day.  The meat she gave to other people; it was only the bones, crisp-fried in boiling fat, that she kept for herself, to nibble with her wine.  (80, 606)

Getting close to the fairy tale again.

All right, time to pick up the next volume.

The depiction of the setting of the novel, the mansion and garden, can be found on p. 33 of Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone (Dream of the Red Chamber) (2012), ed. Andrew Schonebaum and Tina Lu.

The Story of the Stone, volume 2 - all agreed that this was the definitive poem on the subject of eating crabs

I have continued on with The Story of the Stone, the 2,500 page 18th century Chinese novel by, or mostly by, Cao Xueqin.  Here I will write about the second volume of the David Hawkes translation, The Crab-flower Club.  Last time, after reading the first fifth of the novel, I wrote about the interesting tension between the materialist side of the novel, mostly about adult women managing a large, wealthy Beijing household, and the Buddhist fairy tale side, mostly about a boy born with a jade stone in his mouth who is in a teenage love triangle, or quadrangle, counting the enslaved maid he is sleeping with.

In the second volume, she gets a raise and an informal acknowledgement of her status, “her unofficial promotion to his bed” (204).

The teenage cousins, almost all girls, and their cloud of teenage maids, also almost all girls, had moved into a fantastic artificial garden at the end of the last chunk I read.  Something curious happens.  Much of the interest in the novel still comes from the tension between the realist and fantastic side, but for nearly 600 pages the Buddhist fairy tale is abandoned and replaced with a different fantasy genre, one I know well from European literature, the idyll.

It has been the custom from time immemorial to make offerings to the flower fairies on this day.  (24)

… but just at that moment she noticed two enormous butterflies a little way ahead of her, each as large as a child’s fan, fluttering and dancing on the breeze.  She watched them fascinated and thought she would like to play a game with them.  (26)

When [the courtyard] was nicely flooded, they rounded up a number of mallards, sheldrakes, mandarin ducks and other waterfowl, tied their wings together, and having first closed the courtyard gate, set them down in the water to swim about.  (105)

At first he merely nodded and sighed sympathetically; but when he heard the words [cutting some poetry here] he flung himself on the ground in a fit of weeping, scattering the earth all about him with the flowers he had been carrying in the skirt of his gown.  (41)

I am just giving some examples.  That last one really is like the weepy sentimental strain of the European 18th century novel.  With a different bit of poetry it would fit into Rousseau’s Julie (1761), an exact contemporary of The Story of the Stone.

The characters, teenage and adult, spend many chapters planning parties and then throwing parties.  The New Year’s celebration that closes the volume is especially impressive.  The teens also spend a great deal of the novel forming a poetry club, the Crab-flower Club the translator uses as the volume’s title.  They elect officers, write by-laws, set up a calendar and a budget, everything necessary.  Many chapters are devoted to the club’s meetings, poems and all.

“It sounds a splendid idea,” said Xiang-yun.  “But what sort of verbs or abstract nouns had you in mind?”  (236)

The poetry discussion gets awfully sophisticated.  And it all climaxes what must be the greatest scene in world literature, where the poetry club feasts on steamed crabs while composing comic poems about steamed crabs.

When they had finished reading, all agreed that this was the definitive poem on the subject of eating crabs.  (258)

But once in a while the adult world intrudes into the idyll with violence and horror. 

When Jia Zheng heard this, his own heart was softened and he began to wish that he had not beaten the boy quite so savagely.  (153)

The father had just beaten his son nearly to unconsciousness, nearly to death.  Then the re is the episode where another of the men in the family asks his adult daughter to ask his mother to give him her favorite servant (who is somewhere between fifteen and seventeen) as his concubine.  The servant is horrified and luckily the grandmother refuses.  The problem is solved by buying a new teenage concubine in the slave market.  I do not think it as bad as The Tale of Genji, but The Story of the Stone has some serious “consent issues.”

I imagine the American equivalent, if some 18th century Virginian had somehow written a detailed, female-centered thousand-page novel about the family and household help in a giant tobacco plantation.  What a valuable book this would be, historically and perhaps even artistically.  But boy would some scenes would be hard to take.  I think of the trouble we have with the values of Gone with the Wind, published 71 years after the Civil War, and then imagine the horrors in the novel published 71 years before the war.  But no one wrote such a novel.

On to the third part, the middle of Stone.  I am almost half done.  With the poetry club plus later scenes full of rhyming riddles and improvised poems based on dominos, I have concluded that the David Hawkes version is a heroic translation.  Endless difficulties, all overcome somehow.

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.