Time for another update on the Andees wedding. Today we are especially proud to report that your intrepid reporter has looked up the correct spelling of reconnaissance–ridiculous as that spelling may be. In other news, we have an update on accommodations and some suggestions for out of town guests who might have time to visit some nearby attractions.
First off, Cabin Czar Eve Chambers tells us that a dozen or so bookings have already been made to stay in the bunkhouses. There is plenty of room left, so if you’d like a free place to stay that is within a few hundred feet of the main venue, just follow the survey monkey link on the wedding website. The bunks have mattresses, but guests will need to bring bedding. If you are traveling from afar, Eve reports that there will be some sleeping bags available for loan.
The Andees have also reserved a discounted bloc of rooms at the Comfort Inn Columbia Gorge Gateway in Troutdale and we know that several guests have already made reservations there. How do we know this? Heh-heh-heh. Has Comfort Inn integrated the Andees wedding into their recent marketing efforts? Did we buy the information from a Ukrainian hacker who gave us a big discount because we didn’t ask for the credit card numbers? Or did Eve get it from chatting with the reservations clerk? It was one of those.
We know that the hotel is nice because we tried it last weekend. In the afternoons they offer free cookies and soup. The room was very comfortable and the free breakfast was quite all right. We did not sample the biscuits and gravy, but if we had needed some, we noticed that there was enough gravy in that crockpot to have kept us plump and alive for the majority of our remaining years. Another point in the hotel’s favor is that there is a Dairy Queen RIGHT NEXT DOOR. It was only in the interest of research for this bulletin that we had to try it. We can recommend that place also, but watch out for those drips and globs of chocolate sauce that might somehow end up on your shirtfront. We also looked at the dining options in Troutdale. We tried Italian food at Ristorante di Pompello. Good honest food, but nothing to write home about. For the more adventurous, try Tad’s Chicken and Dumplings or Sally’s Tippycanoe, both located just southeast of Troutdale on the old Columbia Gorge highway.
Speaking of which, one of the fine sights in the Gorge is Multnomah Falls, which is easily accessible from Troutdale. To get there, we took the old Gorge Highway leading east out of town. After about five miles, we saw (and ignored) the sign for Camp Angelos and continued along the historic highway. We had to take care as the road is narrow and the day was foggy. At Crown Point the view was glorious, especially if you like really dense fog that blanks out everything farther than twenty yards away. Wow. But no one ever said that reconnaissance was easy, so we pressed on. As we descended the fog lessened and the road took us past several waterfalls. All are worth a look, but Multnomah is the perhaps the grandest.
For visitors with a car, here’s a suggested loop that will give a taste of both the old US 30 through the forest and the newer I-84 along the river. Start by going east through Troutdale on the Old Columbia Gorge Highway. Follow the signs for Crown Point and Multnomah Falls. The old road is lovely, but it’s not fast; allow 25 to 30 minutes of drive time. At the end of March all the waterfalls should be at full flow. When you get to Multnomah Falls, you may or may not be able to find a parking place in the original visitor area, which is rather small. If you can’t find a place there, fear not! Just pass by the falls and continue eastward for three more miles. At that point you’ll be able to get onto I-84 going back to the west. Zoom back three miles and then take the exit for the new Multnomah Falls parking area, which is much larger. Note that this is a LEFT exit. The falls are just a short walk away. Returning to Troutdale via I-84 will take less time than the trip out, about fifteen minutes at normal speeds or just seven and a half minutes if your ride will do a hundred and forty and you don’t get arrested.
In my previous post, I promised that my next one would provide some final thoughts about this work. That was a ridiculous promise. This is a long road; it may never end. Still I must take a few steps. The novel has issues of origin, authorship and provenance that cannot be ignored. These are on two levels. First, there is the question of the origin of the physical text that we have before us. When was it written? Who wrote it? Who may have edited it? Is this the final form that the author intended? Readers and scholars are often interested in these questions, especially when the answers are not straightforward, as is the case here. Secondly, the story itself makes claims about its own origin and how it came to be. These claims are only a very small part of the novel, appearing only in Chapters 1 and 120, but they frame the novel and purport to explain a great deal of what goes on. As a reader, you have to decide what to make of them. These claims are weird and sort of mystical, so let’s not deal with them right now. Instead, let me talk about the first question, the text viewed from outside.
How did the text of a novel come to exist? We don’t usually ask that question. The answer is usually simple–at least as far as we can know. And even if it isn’t simple, is it worth bothering about? That is, is this knowledge critical to understanding and enjoying a novel? I want to say that it is not, because after all the text that one has is the text that one has, no matter its provenance. And yet these issues draw me in; they become part of my reading experience. And of course, other than wasting our time on such issues, what would we rather be doing? Driving a steam locomotive? Wading in a cool stream on a hot day? Having a sudden epiphany that shines a great light on what once was dark? Maybe, but these activities are unavailable me at this particular moment, the one that is elapsing here and now. So I’m stuck. I have learned, though, that in the case of this novel there is a huge rabbit hole down which one may plunge and I have neither the time nor the ability to explore it very far. Hence I will be satisfied, to provide this very much simplified account, knowing that for those who are interested, there is much more to be discovered.
Let’s start with the more or less clearly known. The five books that I have been reading were all produced in England by Penguin Books between 1973 and 1986. The five books tell one continuous story. These volumes are all in English, but the story they tell was originally written in Chinese. Volumes 1-3 were translated by a man named David Hawkes. Volumes 4-5 were translated by another man by the name of John Minton, who happened to be Hawkes’ son-in-law. The Chinese texts that the translators used, they say, were originally produced in the latter half of the 18th Century in what is now Beijing. According to Penguin, the author of Volumes 1-3 was someone called Cao Xueqin while Volumes 4-5 were co-authored by Cao Xueqin and another person called Gao E. (Remember that in Chinese the family name comes first, followed by the given name. So Xueqin and E are first names.)
Sound okay so far? Sure. But this glosses over the fact that Gao E was much younger than Cao Xueqin and it is generally accepted that they never met. Records show that Gao E was a scholar, writer, and government functionary who lived from 1740 to 1815. We have fewer recorded data about Cao Xueqin. We know that he died in 1763 and that when he died he was said to have been working tirelessly on a long novel for at least the previous ten years. It is also generally agreed that Cao Xueqin was his literary name while his original given name was Cao Zhan. We do not know exactly when he was born nor do we have any written records about who his parents were. But there is some compelling indirect evidence that he was a member of one particular Cao family, evidence so compelling that everyone who looks into it–zillions of readers and scholars at this point–comes to pretty much the same conclusion.
Here’s how it works. The fictional world of The Story of the Stone is centered on a large, well-off family named Jia who live in Beijing. The main character’s grandfather was very closely connected to the Emperor and held high office. During the grandfather’s time one of the Jia daughters became a Royal Concubine and the family became wealthy and powerful. The novel gives a detailed description of this wealthy lifestyle–buildings, gardens, clothing, jewelry, and entertainment. But the events of the novel take place a few years after the family’s peak. The grandfather is gone and his sons are not his equals in prestige or ability. Though the family remains wealthy, they are living beyond their means. As the novel progresses, their difficulties become more and more serious until eventually they face ruin. Through it all, the novel presents a detailed portrait of a complex generational and economic hierarchy. It seems to most readers that there is way too much here for anyone to simply invent, that whoever created the fictional Jia family must have had some intimate connection with a real family that he used as a model.
Meanwhile, in the real world of early 18th century China, historical records show that there was a large, well-off family by the name of Cao. The patriarch of the family had been the Emperor’s boyhood friend. As an adult he remained a close confidant and was promoted to high office, serving as the Emperor’s eyes and ears in the important city of Jiangning (which later came to be called Nanking and is now called Nanjing.) One of the Cao daughters was married to the Prince of Jiangning and the Cao family became wealthy and powerful. When the grandfather died, his sons also held high office but were not his equals in prestige or ability and the family’s fortune declined. Though they remained prominent, their debts mounted. After the old emperor died, the new emperor seized all their lands and property and the clan’s days of wealth and influence were abruptly ended. Surely, we all think, Cao Xueqin was one of these Caos. He must have been thinking of his own family when he created the Jias.
One difference between the fictional family and the real family is that the Jias live in Beijing while the Caos spent their glory years in Nanjing. But this is interesting because while there are dozens of passages that indicate that the novel is set in Beijing, there are also one or two rather confusing scenes that would only make sense if the action were occurring in Nanjing. Very untidy. Might the author himself have got confused? Or, might he have written an early version of the novel that was in fact set in Nanjing and then changed his mind? In that case he would have needed to go back through everything that he had already written and change all references to Nanjing so that they pointed to Beijing. But in a novel this long, what a task that would have been! It seems plausible that he might have missed a few, which would explain the confusing passages in the text that we now have. And so, to a certain extent, these textual errors lend further support to the idea that Cao Xueqin must have been thinking of the real Caos when he wrote about the fictional Jias.
So how was Cao Xueqin related to the more famous Caos? Scholars have looked at the Cao Family Annals, which is a contemporary record of the names of all the Caos for several generations. They were expecting, given the author’s great familiarity with the internal workings of the family, that Cao Zhan, aka Cao Xueqin, must have been a part of the innermost circle. Oddly enough, there is no mention in the Annals of anyone named Cao Xueqing or Cao Zhan. Oops. Very untidy. But we’re only getting started…
Cao Xueqin died in 1763, but The Story of the Stone wasn’t published until 1792. What happened in the meantime? A few years after 1763, hand copied manuscripts of the novel began circulating among the literati of Beijing and eventually appeared for sale in book shops. The copies were not all identical; there came to be several versions of the story in circulation. All of them, however, ended abruptly at the end of Chapter 80, just in the middle of the major plot movement and with none of the major issues resolved. Everyone who read the story was left wanting more.
Now fast forward to 1792, twenty-nine years after Cao Xueqin’s death. That’s when someone named Chen Weiyuan published a 120-chapter version. He explained that several years earlier he had obtained an original rough draft version of the final forty chapters as written by Cao Xueqin himself. Chen further claimed that because it was in such rough form, he had enlisted the help of his friend Gao E to edit it and make it presentable. Together, they put the whole of the Story of the Stone into complete and final form. Do we believe this account? Many scholars do not. They doubt the existence of the rough draft that Chen Weiyuan and Gao E claim to have found. It was apparently never shown to anyone else and Chen never really explained how he had come to obtain it. It is easy to suspect that the forty new chapters were simply forged in order to cash in on the demands of an eager market.
This suggestion of fraud is plausible; certainly it is not any less plausible than Chen’s story of fortuitously discovering of a long hidden manuscript by a long dead author. As a reader, when I compare Volumes 1-3 with Volumes 4-5, I see definite differences in pacing, subject and style. The focus in the latter volumes is less on the young people and more on their elders. The action is fast and furious. There is less poetry. But these changes have already begun in the latter half of Volume 3. It’s pretty much what always happens when the world comes crashing down. It could easily have been the original author’s intention all along. And the mystical end frame in chapters 119 and 120 is quite consistent with the mythical beginning frame in chapters 1 to 3. One of the translators, David Hawkes, notes that when Cao Xueqin died, he left a young widow, quite possibly an illiterate one.* Perhaps the author had made a draft of all 120 chapters and had then begun to heavily revise it. When he finished revising the first 80 chapters, he might have thought that those were good enough to begin circulating them among his friends while he continued to revise the final 40. But then perhaps death intervened. Hawkes speculates that the 40 rough chapters remained in the widow’s possession for many years, until somehow or other they became available and made their way into the hands of Chen Weiyuan. I like that story. That is, I like it because it’s nice, not because I think it surely must be true. The fact is that here we have yet more untidiness. I can’t clean it up, so I’ll just have to let it go.
*Few Chinese women could read or write during that era. But many of the female Jia cousins are exceptions to this, including several of the main characters, who are well versed in the classics and also excellent poets. Was the situation similar in the Cao family? We don’t know. But what if it were? What if the reason that the names Cao Zhan and Cao Xueqin are not found in the annals is that they were both pseudonyms for someone else whose identity was deliberately obscured. Could that someone else have been a woman? Well…no, probably not. There is a lot of counter evidence. Nice story though.
After the great purge, my 32 linear feet of books was reduced to just 52 inches. Six of those remaining inches, more than ten per cent of my entire library, was taken up by just one novel. Before we get on to considering it as a work of literature, let’s take a minute to have some fun with its physical reality. My Penguin Classics edition consists of five paperback volumes. Volume 1 is titled The Golden Days. It includes a 32-page introduction by the translator, 488 pages of text, a seven-page appendix, and a six-page list of characters that includes 191 names. Volumes 2 and 3 run to about 600 pages each; Volumes 4 and 5 each have around 400. All together, the five volumes add up to 2,558 pages–2,335 pages of core text and another 223 pages of prefaces, introductions and appendices. There are roughly 440 named characters.
We can see, then, that this is not a reading project to be undertaken lightly. Besides being long, it has a lot of characters to keep track of, most of whom have names that are difficult for non-Chinese speakers to pronounce. But wait, there’s more. The novel was published in the middle of the 1700’s and concerns the fortunes of a wealthy Peking family during a period of time a few decades earlier. Early readers of the story would have been familiar with such families and with the cultural milieu within which they operated. Presumably, they would also have had familiarity with Chinese history prior to the 1700’s. This would have helped them grasp the significance of the many historical and literary references in the novel. For the rest of us, the world of the novel is so far away from us, both in distance and in time, that it might as well be another planet.
Ah…but the key here, as with so many things in life, is perseverance. If you spend enough time in this novel, you’ll find that it teaches you the things you need to know. The translator’s introductions and appendices are helpful. (There is even a basic guide to Chinese pronunciation, so that when you tell your friends that you’re reading a book by Cao Xueqin, you’ll be able to pronounce it Tsao Shueh Chin, thus increasing everyone’s confusion.) Another help is that the original Chinese names of the servants have been changed to English words that are roughly equivalent. That means that whenever you see names like Starbright, Patience, or Ripple, not only will you remember them a bit more easily, but you will also get partially clued in to the person’s status.
Mostly, though, the novel will teach you what you need to know by plopping you down into the domestic life of a wealthy family in 18th Century China and just letting you watch things unfold. Much of the story centers on a group of teenagers, an age cohort drawn from several branches of the family, all of whom are living within the very large family compound. The author was himself a member of a wealthy family, a family that lost its wealth at just about the time he came of age. It is clear that vast chunks of this vast novel are based on his memories of carefree, golden days spent with his siblings and cousins in the time before the debacle. The description of these golden days is quite detailed and does not move swiftly. Volume 2, for example, which is titled The Crab Flower Club, has 550+ pages of text, but covers only a nine-month period in the life of the Jia family. And while events are told in mostly chronological order, individual episodes–of which there are literally hundreds–are often not directly connected to the episodes that come immediately before or immediately after. This can be a little overwhelming. The first time I read all five volumes, it took me a year and a half to finish, mostly because every four hundred pages or so I would give up in disgust. Yes, yes, yes,” I wanted to say to the author, “This is all fine, but who in their right mind would possibly care?” I seemed to be doing way too much work and making so little progress.
There are two sides to this. The first difficulty is density. The novel is broken into 120 chapters, but these breaks are somewhat arbitrary. Most chapters actually consist of more than one scene. Like the chapters themselves, these always occur in chronological order, but they are not always unified by character or theme. So, as you read along, the novel actually resolves itself into several hundred discrete pieces. And every piece needs care, for while they seem to be about very little, unpacking them is hard work. What we come to understand is that no matter how minor the crisis may seem, it must be resolved with a careful eye on a balance of personal emotions and strict conventions. The hierarchies in which the characters move are the great determiner of all actions, but positions in the hierarchy are never fully fixed. A character’s status (face) is often at risk and negotiation of status, both overt and covert, is constant. Overall harmony is both absolutely required and obviously unobtainable. The world of the novel is a pressure cooker always threatening to explode. The sheer volume of personal enmities, cliques and cabals is daunting.
The second difficulty is what I want to call triviality. So many things happen, so much dialogue is spoken, so many feelings are exposed, and all to no great consequence–or so it seems. Much of the first half of the novel concerns an endless round of genteel social gatherings, which range from the highly ceremonial and to the very informal but which do not advance any particular story arc. The menus, the seating arrangements, the clothing, the kind and quantity of food, the appropriate guest list, extracts of conversations–all these are presented in some detail. But what then? The event occurs, the chapter ends, and we forget that party, only to start all over with the next. We read what are essentially the detailed minutes of a meeting of the teenagers’ poetry club. We learn about the romantic entanglements of minor characters who appear only in one or two episodes in the whole vast saga and then disappear. We read about lots of minor illnesses and lots of teen angst. And then, out of nowhere, a servant character that we never really met before is driven to a sudden suicide by some careless remarks made by a character that we do know. And a bit later on, another minor character that we have never met before gets beaten up for having made homosexual advances. At first, it wasn’t clear to me what I was supposed to make of these lurid intrusions. But as I said before, the novel eventually starts to teach you what you need to know. In my case it took about 1400 pages, but eventually I came to understand that the novel is primarily three things: besides being a memoir of a golden time, it is also a classic boy-girl-girl love triangle and an extended demonstration of the nature of human reality. But more on that later.
Actually, at somewhere around 1200 pages, there’s a change in tone and things get a little more serious. For one thing, certain of the more sensible characters begin to worry about the family finances. Over their long years of prosperity, the family has developed expensive personal tastes as well as the habit of maintaining a lavish public façade. Such expenses are very rarely questioned. At the same time, the working age males devote themselves to a variety of pursuits, none of them particularly remunerative. The family has started living off its capital.
And then there is a potentially serious problem concerning one of the important male members of the family who has chosen to take a second wife. There is nothing culturally wrong with having a second wife, but, like everything else one does, it has to be done according to convention and only with the knowledge and ostensible approval of the entire clan, including, of course, the first wife. In this case, the besotted husband knows that the woman he has chosen is problematic, so he has decided to skip the approval process and marry her in secret. With the help of one or two other male family members, he has arranged to install the new wife in a separate house outside the family compound and is trying to keep the whole arrangement from ever coming to the attention of the rest of the family. As it happens, his first wife–the one he’s not telling–is the formidable Wang Xi-feng, the woman whom the all-powerful matriarch has delegated to manage day-to-day household affairs for the whole clan. Xi-feng is very smart, very capable and utterly lacking in scruples. As we would say today, her husband and his enablers haven’t really thought this through. Such incompetence bodes ill for them and for the family in general.
But enough! I need to get back to my reading. When I’m done, provided that it is my fate ever to be done, I’ll post again with a final appreciation.
