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.