My previous post on this topic concerned issues surrounding the book’s origin: the identity of its author, the many variant texts, and the mysterious discovery of the final forty chapters–twenty-five years after the appearance of the first eighty. Scholars have developed various theories that they have tested using various techniques. They have done historical research; they have drawn a conclusions from textual discrepancies; and some have used computers to perform stylistic analysis in an attempt to determine the probability that the various sections were all written by the same author. I call that examining the text from the outside.
Now let’s go inside. Let’s see how the book itself addresses the topic of how it came to be. The very first sentence of Chapter 1 is the following question: “What, you may ask, was the origin of this book?” What follows is fantastical and a little convoluted. It’s worth looking at, though, this story told by a text about itself, because it’s only partly about where the book comes from. Its more important purpose is to give clues to the book’s larger meaning. The story begins in the first five pages of Chapter 1 and is only taken up again in the last few pages of Chapter 120. The opening of Chapter 1 is really quite wonderful. It’s mysterious, but still concise and clear. How much of this goodness comes from Hawkes? How much from Cao Xueqin? How much from Gao E? How much from all the various other editors and commentators? Ha-ha-ha. Maybe somebody knows, but I don’t.) In any case, only if you do not have the real text in front of you, should you even bother with my condensed version in the next three paragraphs.
The story started a long time ago when the Goddess Nü-wa was engaged in repairing the sky. To make her materials, she melted down a great quantity of rock and created 36,501 large building blocks. She used 36,500 of them in her work, leaving one unused. It remained, all on its own, at the foot of Greensickness Peak in the Great Fable Mountains. Having been made by the goddess, the block had magic powers; it could move about and could grow or shrink to any size. Having been the only block rejected, however, the stone felt unworthy, and spent its days feeling lonely and depressed. Then one day two figures approached, a Buddhist monk and a Taoist. They sat down to talk near the block, which had shrunk itself into an attractive size and shape and made itself translucent. The monk saw it, picked it up and began speaking to it, telling the stone that he would cut some words into it and then take it to a special place, “a luxurious and opulent locality.” When the stone began asking questions, the monk brushed them off, saying “You will know soon enough.” The monk slipped the stone into his pocket and he and the Taoist set off for parts unknown.
Long, long after these events, a Taoist called Vanitas passed through the same area at the base of Greensickness peak. He saw a large stone on which there was a long inscription. Vanitas read the inscription and learned of the stone’s creation by the goddess and about how a Buddhist mahasattva and a Taoist illuminate had taken it into the world of mortals where it lived out the life of a man. The inscription went into great detail about the conditions and events of the man’s early life. There was also a quatrain:
Found unfit to repair the azure sky, Long years a foolish mortal man was I. My life in both worlds on this stone is writ; Pray who will copy out and publish it?
Vanitas responded to this question by telling the stone that although the story was certainly interesting and might merit publication, it lacked moral grandeur, especially since much of it concerned the affairs of females–their follies, their insignificant virtues and their trifling talents. The stone strenuously rebutted these arguments and Vanitas stopped to think. He then gave the book a careful second reading. (Ah yes . . . the careful second reading!) He saw that it was a true record of real events and decided to copy it out and look for a publisher. The manuscript passed through many hands and had many different titles. Someone named Cao Xueqin–we are told–worked on it for a long time and changed its name to The Twelve Beauties of Jinling. A later annotator changed the title back to the original one. At the end of this section we read this:
Pages full of idle words, Penned with hot and bitter tears: All men call the author fool: None his secret message hears.
So that’s a quick summary of the first five pages of Chapter 1. The chapter continues for fourteen more pages and deals with many other topics. I remember from my first reading that the whole of opening chapter seemed very busy, but also vague and purposeless, semi-transparent. I found it very difficult to remember. The chapter starts in a mythical landscape where a goddess is making giant blocks to repair the sky; it ends in a provincial town in imperial China where a man named Feng Su is rousted out of his modest home just before bedtime and taken away to be examined by the local magistrate. This radical transition from divine to mundane occurs gradually and quite magically, as if by sleight of hand. Which is all well and good, but what does it all mean and where in the hell is this novel going?
As it happens, sandwiched between the goddess Nü-wa and the farmer Feng Su there are matters of great importance; themes are announced, themes that only come clear much later. I’ll mention only the central one, the matter of Zhen Shi-yin and his vision. When we first meet him, around the middle of Chapter 1, Shi-yin is middle-aged and is living a modest but comfortable life with his wife and young daughter. He is a scholarly sort and quite unambitious. One hot summer afternoon, as he is just about to drift off, he overhears a monk and a Taoist talking outside his window. Their conversation fascinates him and eventually he dares to speak to them. In answer to one of his questions, the monk hands him a stone with the words “Magic Jade” engraved upon it. As Shi-yin bends to examine it more closely, the monk snatches it back. He and the Taoist then depart through a large stone archway. At the top of the arch there is a sign proclaiming it to be an entrance to The Land of Illusion. On the columns of the arch are two more lines of writing. On the first is written “Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s real.” On the other column, the words say “Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real.”
Following the occasion of this vision or dream, terrible things happen to Shi-yin, including the loss of his house by fire and the disappearance of his only child. He and his wife are forced to move in with his father-in-law, a crafty and unpleasant fellow named Feng Su. A little later Shi-yin wanders off in the company of an apparent madman and disappears. (All of this and much more–and we’re still in Chapter 1!) But never mind the details. The main thing–for many readers, not just me–is that the table has been set, a theme has been announced. The messages on the two columns in Shi-yin’s vision are not exactly meant to enlighten, not at this point; but they are meant to provide an outline of the larger stage upon which the drama will be played.
Eventful as it is, Chapter 1 makes no direct reference to what the novel’s main story might be. And guess what? Neither does the equally eventful Chapter 2. If you’ve read my previous post, where I made such a fuss about the Jia family, you might be wondering what any of this has to do with them. Well, it’s a meandering road to the Jia mansion, but in Chapter 3 the reader finally gets there and then pretty much stays there for a long, long time or at least for the space of many, many a page. There is time to follow the thoughts and passions of dozens of vivid, complex characters who exhibit a vast range of human characteristics and behaviors. It’s hard, at first, to figure any of these people out. The story comes from so far away in time and Westerners always have a hard time with the seeming indirectness of Chinese culture. But in such a long novel, there’s plenty of time to figure it out. Pretty soon we come to see that the characters are dealing with the same joys, sorrows and mysteries that we deal with. We see that the varying strategies that they choose are a lot like ours, just different enough to make it interesting.
If there is any center to this swirl of characters, it must be Jia Bao-yu, a young man born with a jade in his mouth. He’s a complex and unusual young fellow who sometimes seems strange to everyone–to his family and friends, to his servants, and to us readers who are witnessing it all. But his romantic situation as he comes of age is immediately recognizable; the contrast between Dai-yu and Bao-chai is a variation on a universal theme; and the resolution could not be more melodramatic. Great stuff.
Eventually, once we get past all that, we come to the end: Chapter 120. That’s where Shi-yin reappears. Remember him? He’s not wandering anymore but lives in a small thatched hut near a rustic ferry crossing. He meets a younger man whom he knew long ago and invites him into the hut. In the course of their conversation, the younger man asks, “But if Bao-yu is a person of such a remarkable spiritual pedigree, why did he first need to be blinded by human passion before he could reach enlightenment?” Shi-yin smiles and answers, “Even though I may seek to expound on this, I fear you may never be able to understand it fully. The Land of Illusion and the Paradise of Truth are one and the same.”
Shi-yin’s fear is justified. The idea that Illusion and Truth are the same is not something that any of us are likely to fully understand. We know that truth and illusion are different. We are not always certain about which one applies, but we know very well what each of the term means, or at least we think we do. And yet how often it happens that the two suddenly change places, or worse, seem both to apply at once. In Chapter 117 there is a scene in which Bao-yu’s mother is speaking to him about a certain holy man who has been disturbing the peace of the household. Here’s Minton’s translation of part of their exchange:
Lady Wang turned to Bao-yu: ‘Well–where does he live?’ Bao-yu smiled enigmatically: ‘His abode is, well . . . far away and yet at the same time close at hand. It all depends on how you look at it.’
The Land of Illusion and the Paradise of Truth are one and the same. That’s what it all means, this ridiculously long and messy book . . . if it means anything.