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.