The Chinese The Dream of the Red Chamber may well be as great a book as the Japanese The Tale of Genji. Its virtues are not as obvious. In fact, they are not obvious at all. They are the virtues that distinguish Chinese civilization from Japanese — the virtues of a vaster humanity. Both novels have a lucidity and immediacy of narrative seldom encountered in Western fiction of a serious character, but amongst us confined to cowboys, detectives, and the funny papers. Alex Comfort once compared Chinese fiction to Pepys’s Diary, “a perfectly translucent medium through which we see the characters in all their moral nudity.” The contemporary author most like a Chinese novelist is Georges Simenon. You are too busy with the story to notice psychological insight or dramatic command until a week after you have finished the book.
The plot is the familiar, recurrent one of so much great fiction, as it is a specialty of both Chinese fiction and philosophy of history — “When women rule, the house decays” — but also its contrary, a celebration of the matriarchy that underlies and sustains Chinese society. Like all great fiction, it is also the story of the immensely difficult achievement of personal integrity. The narrative works toward a transcendental meaning of life through that life itself, which so conspicuously hides all such meaning. The characters are all “fallen beings.” The hero is an unprepossessing, idle scholar-gentleman, timid, oversexed, unstable. The two young heroines are both hysterics, the villainess a stock ruthless sister-in-law. The action is confined almost entirely to the women’s quarters and consists mostly of vapors, tantrums, fugues, and quarrels. Time goes by. As in life, the characters run down, coarsen, sicken, and die. At the end everybody is worn out.
Yet Pao Yu’s meaningless life unconsciously evolves slowly toward illumination. He is a Taoist saint who doesn’t know he is one and doesn’t want to be one. Like Prince Genji, he is indifferent to and ignorant of his cosmic role. He struggles, unaware, against an embodied principle of hate. When salvation comes, it is scarcely distinguishable from its opposite. Behind commonplace life and death lurks another world which intrudes at all crucial moments, a mirror-image more real than this life, where destiny is achieved and manifest; like the dream time of the Australian aborigines where everybody is his own ancestor that lies dormant below the dust of the desert and is awakened by penances of blood and feathers.
Genji is a mystical Buddhist work. The Dream of the Red Chamber is Taoist; its principle of salvation is inaction — wu’wei: the strength of the still keystone in the arch; the water wandering amongst mountains, seeking its own level, eventually wearing away the highest peaks. The talisman of Pao Yu’s integrity is the uncut stone of precious jade with which he is born, which he loses and finds again at the brink of death. Pao Yu’s father, Chi Cheng, the embodiment of patriarchal legalism, presides over the waking world with iron rigor and unrelenting contempt for his son and all his ways; but the dramatic pivots of the novel are a series of dreams, apparitions of the true world in which doubled images of the girls who love and hate Pao Yu function as moral determinants, presided over by the great matriarch, the grandmother of the family.
It is the metaphysical modesty of Taoism that gives The Dream of the Red Chamber its style, that modesty which is the necessary ingredient of the very greatest style in any art. The most profound human relationships; the deepest psychological insights; the most intense drama; the revelation of the moral universe in trivial human action, in the simple narrative of ordinary happenings — greatness of heart, magnanimity (“human-heartedness” is the Chinese term) is the substance from which the narrative is carved.
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