When I attended an international Short Story Conference in Shanghai in 2016, I was asked to take part in the opening plenary session. Heaven knows why! I suspect it may have had something to do with the fact that they'd never had any New Zealanders attending their celebrations before ...
There I am above, a couple of seats from the right end of the row.
At one point the moderator enquired if any of us Westerners had been influenced by Chinese models in our own writing. I replied: "Yes, I have - by the Chinese novel."
Was I right to detect a little scepticism in his voice when he asked me just how I'd been affected by Chinese fiction?
I learned very early in my Academic career never to lie about having read something if you haven't actually done so. Once or twice I've fallen into one of those awkward situations where everyone assumes that you, too, have read a book just because the discussion's moved onto it - but even then I find it's best to break in at some point and confess your ignorance.
So, while I don't speak or read Chinese, and therefore have no direct knowledge of Chinese literature beyond my extensive reading of translations, I don't really think that there's much on the great classic Chinese novels in English which I haven't pored over at one time or another.
In particular, I wrote an essay, "In Love with the Chinese Novel: A Voyage around the Hung Lou Meng", which appeared in brief 37 (2009), after being long-listed for the Landfall Essay Prize. I've also put up a number of posts on the Four Great Classical Chinese Novels on this blog at various times.
I didn't have time to go into all that in my remarks at the conference. But I did try to explain my fascination with the structural methods used by the Old Masters who wrote - or compiled - the traditional Chinese novels: in particular their use of self-contained, short-story-like chapters to build up their immense fictional structures.
Among other things, I mentioned that I first started reading the Hung Lou Meng, or "Red Chamber Dream" - in translation - when I bought a second-hand copy of the first volume of the complete Beijing Foreign Languages Publishing House version as a teenager in the late 1970s. 3 November 1979 is the date I find written on the flyleaf of the book, which I still own ...
While I meant nothing but the profoundest respect for the genius of Cao Xueqin and his great novel with these remarks, they do appear to have given offence. A couple of days later I was chairing a session which included one of the numerous well-known Chinese writers who attended the conference. His English was not good, but his translator conveyed a few comments of his à propos of the Hung Lou Meng and the impossibility that any non-Chinese speaker could ever possibly understand it.
In particular, he mentioned that he'd just finished reading it for the first time, in his mid-forties, and doubted that an adolescent could appreciate its emotional and cultural complexities - any claim to have read it at such a young age was clearly mendacious.
We'd already strayed past the end of our allotted time, and while it was fairly apparent that his comments were mostly directed at me, I had to let them go unchallenged. I've thought quite a lot about what he had to say since, though.
Mainly because I agree with him. Of course I have no claim to understand the Hung Lou Meng. I didn't when I first encountered it, and I don't now. But I have read both of the complete English translations several times, as well as various abridgements and commentaries. All that would have to be seen as analogous with reading Dante or Shakespeare in translation, though: something of the drama may come across, but virtually none of the actual poetry.
My riposte to him, however, would have been that he himself was ready enough to cite Chekhov and Mansfield and other writers whom he'd only encountered in translation. How is that different from my own attempts to glean something of the original Hung Lou Meng through these artful and erudite translations? Did he grudge me that? In a weird way, I felt he was almost jealous of the amount of time I'd spend reading this novel. I was seventeen when I bought my first copy. It's never really been out of my mind since.
It was as if it had been such a great experience for him to read it, that he hated the thought that anyone else - especially an impudent foreigner - could be allowed to undermine his achievement. That, too, was something I could certainly empathise with. "Been there; done that" is the last thing you want to hear about such a profoundly life-changing moment.
[Books I own are marked in bold]:
Tsao Hsueh-Chin & Kao Ngo. A Dream of Red Mansions. Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi & Gladys Yang. 3 vols. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978-80.
Redology, according to Wikipedia, is:
the academic study of Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of China. There are numerous researchers in this field; most can be divided into four general groups: the first group are the commentators, ...; the second group is the index group, ...; the third group are the textual critics, ...; the final group are the literary critics.
The first of the two major English translations of this work, begun in 1961 and published in three volumes from 1978 to 1980, was by Yang Xianyi & Gladys Yang, whose names can be found on the title-pages of a great many of the - then Peking, now Beijing - Foreign Languages Press editions of classic Chinese texts.
Cao Xueqin. The Story of the Stone: A Chinese Novel by Cao Xueqin in Five Volumes. Trans. David Hawkes. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973-80.Cao Xueqin & Gao E. The Story of the Stone (Also Known as The Dream of the Red Chamber): A Chinese Novel by Cao Xueqin in Five Volumes, edited by Gao E. Trans. John Minford. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982-86.
- Vol. 1: The Golden Days (1973)
- Vol. 2: The Crab-Flower Club (1977)
- Vol. 3: The Warning Voice (1980)
- Vol. 4: The Debt of Tears (1982)
- Vol. 5: The Dreamer Wakes (1986)
The second was also a joint effort, composed in close collaboration by two British-born academics, David Hawkes and his son-in-law John Minford, who worked on it - together and apart - over a period of roughly fifteen years. I've made some comments on this version here.
Alongside these two monumental achievements, there are a few other incomplete versions which ought to be acknowledged:
Cao Xueqin. The Dream of the Red Chamber. Trans. H. Bencraft Joly. 1892-93. Foreword by John Minford. Introduction by Edwin Lowe. Tokyo / Rutland, Vermont / Singapore: Tuttle Publishing, 2010.
This was the first real attempt at a full translation into English. Its author, Henry Bencraft Joly (1857-1898), was the British Vice-Consul in Macao, where he finished his version of Chapters 1-56, published in two volumes in 1892-93. In his informative introduction to the 2010 reprint, John Minford is honest both about its merits and its shortcomings:
Bencraft Joly's incomplete translation has the merit of being quite a literal one ... He admits that "shortcomings" will be discovered, "both in the prose, and among the doggerel and uncouth rhymes, in which the text has been more adhered to than rhythm."Minford adds that "one should not be too critical of Joly's refusal to deal with the mildly erotic layer of the novel ... Joly's contemporary Herbert Giles, in translating the Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio of Pu Songling, also bowlderised. They were both creatures of their time."
Tsao Hsueh-Chin. Dream of the Red Chamber. Trans. Chi-chen Wang. 1929. Preface by Mark van Doren. London: Vision Press, 1959.
Wang Chi-chen (1899-2001) revised and enlarged his 1929 abridgement of the novel for the 1959 edition. As he himself explains in his introduction to the new version:
The present translation just about doubles the old one in the actual amount of significant material included, if not in actual number of words ... In my first translation, I took the Dream to be essentially a love story, and omitted many episodes made up of what then seemed to me like trivial details. But I have since come to realize that what Tsao Hsueh-Chin tried to do is to describe the life of a large household and that these "trivial details" are as important to the book as the story of of Pao-yu and Black Jade [Lin Dai-yu]."In general," he concludes. "I have omitted nothing from the first 80 chapters which I consider significant."
In his preface, Mark Van Doren praises Mr. Wang's "admirable style, which is colloquial as that of the original is colloquial, and which does not hesitate to use modern terms in the faith that their equivalent existed in the matchless novel of manners he translates." This slightly barbed encomium would probably be echoed by most modern readers. Wang's version is certainly readable enough, but it's more of an interpretation than an actual translation of the Hung Lou Meng itself, in all its layered detail.
Kuhn, Franz, ed. Hung Lou Meng: The Dream of the Red Chamber – A Chinese Novel of the Early Ching Period. 1932. Trans. Isabel and Florence McHugh. 1958. The Universal Library. New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1968.
This was an English translation of an abridged German version of the novel. Franz Kuhn (1884-1961) also made translations of other Chinese novels, such as the Ch'in P'ing Mei (1930), which at least filled the gap until more complete translations from the Chinese could be provided.
In his introduction, Kuhn claims of his version that it "presents about five-sixths of the original ... Though my translation is not a complete one, I may still claim to be the first Westerner to have made acessible the monumental structure of the Hung Lou Meng. My version gives a full rendering of the main narrative, which is organised around the three figures of Pao Yu, Black Jade [Dai-yu] and Precious Clasp [Bao-chai]."
It's a little difficult to see how he arrives at that estimate of "five-sixths of the original", but his version remains a convenient one for those unwilling to undertake the full adventurous journey through the novel itself.
Pauline Chen. The Red Chamber. Virago Press. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2012.
There's something rather cunning about the idea of adapting the Hung Lou Meng into a more conventional modern historical romance, centred around the fateful love story between Lin Dai-yu and Jia Bao-yu. Pauline A. Chen certainly has strong qualifications for the task.
The American-born daughter of Taiwanese parents, she completed her PhD in East Asian Studies at Princeton, focussing on pre-modern Chinese poetry. She is now a Professor of Chinese language and literature in Ohio. She comments in the author's note to her novel:
Cao's masterpiece is largely unknown to Western audiences, perhaps due to its daunting length (2,500 pages) and complex cast of characters (more than 400). My book, The Red Chamber, makes little attempt to remain faithful to the original plot, but is a reimagining of the inner lives and motivations of the three major female characters ...She goes on to observe that "like many readers, I was haunted by a sense of incompletion: Cao's original ending has been lost, and a new ending was written by another hand after his death. What follows is my attempt to finish the story for myself, while paying homage to this beloved masterpiece and sharing it with a larger audience."
I'd second those sentiments. Scholarly bickering aside, it's hard for me to see the last forty chapters of the Hung Lou Meng as anything but "a new ending ... written by another hand" after the author's death.
The other day I bought a small, two-level book trough from a vintage shop, where it was sitting neglected in a dusty corner.
After a couple of false starts, it occurred to me that it was just the right size to hold my copies of the various translations and other texts related to the Hung Lou Meng.
So here it is: my Redology bookshelf.
Bronwyn Lloyd: Redology Bookshelf (11/12/24)As well as the four categories of Redologists mentioned in the Wikipedia page above, there's also a chronological breakdown of the various eras of study of the novel, compiled by Joey Bonner in 1976:
Pre-1791:Commentators on the pre-publication manuscripts, such as Rouge Inkstone and Odd Tablet, who mainly provide literary analysis of the first 80 chapters.1791–1900:Post-publication questions over authorship of the addendum, speculation upon esoteric aspects of the book. After 1875 using the term "Redology" for the studies.1900–1922:Mainly political interpretations.1922–1953:"New Redology", led by Hu Shih, approaches questions of textual authenticity, documentation, dating, with a strong biographical focus. The labelling of previous periods as "Old Redology".1954–1975:Marxist literary criticism: the book seen as a criticism of society's failures. Li Xifan's criticism of both Old Redology and Neo-Redologists such as Hu Shih and Yu Pingbo.
So what exactly has changed in Redology since 1976, which is (after all) half a century ago?
It's clearly a field of study for expert Sinologists only, but I suppose - in general terms - the "class" analysis of the novel has continued in Mainland China, whereas scholars at universities elsewhere have tended to stress other contextual and stylistic details of Cao's work.
One can see this even in the two major translations of the novel: the very literal Yang version, with its emphasis on the decadence of the Jia family's "Dream of Red Mansions" even in its title; whereas the more liberally interpretative Hawkes / Minford version tries to avoid the "Red Chamber Dream" label altogether, instead choosing to refer it by the name of the earlier, 80-chapter text, The Story of the Stone.
Speaking for myself, I'm glad to have access to both of these traditions: it is, after all, a book to be read - not simply one to pore over and annotate - and one advantage of the Marxist approaches prevalent in China has been that the novel has remained available there through all the turbulent years since 1949.
Or, as Johannes Kaminski explains it in the abstract to his 2017 article "Toward a Maoist Dream of the Red Chamber: Or, How Baoyu and Daiyu Became Rebels Against Feudalism":
Mao Zedong’s views on literature were enigmatic: although he coerced writers into “learning the language of the masses,” he made no secret of his own enthusiasm for Dream of the Red Chamber, a novel written during the Qing dynasty. In 1954 this paradox appeared to be resolved when Li Xifan and Lan Ling presented an interpretation that saw the tragic love story as a manifestation of class struggle. Ever since, the conception of Baoyu and Daiyu as class warriors has become a powerful and unquestioned cliché of Chinese literary criticism ...
The fact is that the Hung Lou Meng is, in many ways, a very frustrating book.
There's an old legend, reported by his early biographer Giovanni Boccaccio, that Dante Alighieri died leaving the last 13 cantos of his Divine Comedy incomplete. Dante’s sons, Jacopo and Piero, were about to start the presumptuous task of completing the work themselves, when the poet appeared to them in a dream and pointed out a sealed window alcove which turned out to contain a somewhat mildewed copy of the missing pages.
If only the same thing had happened with the Hung Lou Meng! The first 80 chapters of Cao Xueqin's work - all that was available in the earliest manuscripts - seem all to be by the same hand: albeit with marginal comments and revisions by a variety of commentators, possibly from the writer's own family.
The final 40 chapters in the 1791 printed version, which the book's editors, Gao E and Cheng Weiyuan, claimed to have compiled from the author's own remaining manuscripts, are very different in tone:
In 2014, three researchers using data analysis of writing styles announced that "Applying our method to the Cheng–Gao version of Dream of the Red Chamber has led to convincing if not irrefutable evidence that the first 80 chapters and the last 40 chapters of the book were written by two different authors."Whatever the status of these final chapters, they certainly don't fulfil the plot-expectations set up in the first part of the novel. It is, of course, possible that some of the writing contained in them comes from fragments left behind by Cao Xueqin, but there's no definitive evidence either way.
So the novel, albeit labelled as "complete" in its 120-chapter version, remains a magnificent fragment. But then, the same must be said of the Aeneid or The Canterbury Tales: works left incomplete on their authors' desks when they died. That doesn't hinder them from being considered as cornerstones of world literature. Cao Xueqin's novel is on that level - an immortal work of genius which repays endless study.
If you're curious to know more and (like me) you lack competence in Chinese, here are some possible starting points:
- Lu Hsun. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. 1923-24. Trans. Yang Hsien-Yi & Gladys Yang. 1959. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1982.
- Wu Shih-Ch’Ang. On The Red Chamber Dream: A Critical Study of Two Annotated Manuscripts of the XVIIIth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961.
- Hsia, C. T. The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction. 1968. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
- Plaks, Andrew H. Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976.
- Hegel, Robert E. The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.
- Plaks, Andrew H. The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel: Ssu ta ch'i-shu. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.
- Rolston, David L., ed. How to Read the Chinese Novel. Contributions from Shuen-fu Lin, David T. Roy, Andrew H. Plaks, John C. Y Wang, David L. Rolston, Anthony C. Yu. Princeton Library of Asian Translations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
- Edwards, Louise P. Men & Women in Qing China: Gender in The Red Chamber Dream. Sinica Leidensia #31. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994.
- Rolston, David L. Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary: Reading and Writing Between the Lines. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
- Yu, Anthony C. Rereading the Stone: Desire and the Making of Fiction in Dream of the Red Chamber. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
- Liu Zaifu. Reflections on Dream of the Red Chamber. 2005. Trans. Shu Yanzhong. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008.
- Wu I-Hsien. Eroticism and Other Literary Conventions in Chinese Literature: Intertextuality in The Story of the Stone. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2017.
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