Organizer: Ming Dong Gu, University of Chicago
Chair: Robert E. Hegel, Washington University
Discussant: Anthony C. Yu, University of Chicago
As the 20th century is drawing to its close, Redology or the Hongloumeng scholarship is currently witnessing a phenomenon which may be called the fin-de-siecle splendor. Redology has, since the beginning of the century, continued to be a "hot" subject among scholars of Chinese literature and culture. The field of scholarship, however, has been haunted by a looming shadow, a sense of increasing crisis. In 1996, several newspapers and journals in China carried articles and essays which unequivocally declare that the Redology "has reached the end of its tether (daole shanqiong shuijing de dibu)" (See essays in the Hongloumeng xuekan, Vol. 69, No. 3, 1996).
This panel, instead of surveying the achievements and failures in the field of Redology, attempts to look beyond the 20th century and to see what the new century may bring. Although we do not claim to hold any satisfactory solutions to the so-called crisis, we do believe that a consideration of new paradigms may put us on the right track. Since we are concerned with how to push Redology beyond the achievements of the 20th century, the major objective of the panel is to find ways to open up new vistas in Redology and to help make the shift of study from Caoxue—studies of Cao Xuoqin the author to Hongxue—the study of the novel as a great literary masterpiece. Taking inspirations from present-day literary theories, we call for a new paradigm of reading which is open, pluralistic, and inclusive. We suggest this paradigm because we believe that the novel, conceived and composed on the author’s self-conscious awareness of the reciprocity between the making of the novel and a poetics of fiction, is a metafiction and an open fiction. Emulating the pioneering work done by Professor Anthony C. Yu in his recent book, Rereading The Stone: Desire and The Making of Fiction (Princeton U.P., 1997), our panel will conduct some theorizing and practical criticism to help make the shift of focus from what Cao Xueqin writes to how he presents what he writes and how he influences what his successors write. In its varied ways, each of the papers hopes to contribute its modest share in the effort to make the fundamental shift from Caoxue to Hongxue and to enlarge the scope of Hongloumeng scholarship as Redology heads towards the twenty-first century.
Tina Lu examines the novel’s avoidance of political, historical and geographical specificity. Arguing that the author’s vagueness has a great significance for the making and reading of the novel, she suggests that by placing the novel in an imaginary space, the author meant to create a work which invites open readings. Ming Dong Gu explores a similar aspect of the novel. By analyzing the creation of the Land of Illusion and Daguanyuan and their relationship, he argues that the Hongloumeng is conceived, constructed, and composed on an open art of fiction, and as an open novel it is amenable to open readings. Because of its open fictiveness, he calls for an open paradigm of reading. Liangyan Ge’s paper focuses on how the Hongloumeng carries on the meta-narrative implications in three of its predecessors. Ge suggests that Cao Xueqin inherits the stone symbolism but transforms it from a tool of moral didacticism to an exercise of artistic creativeness.
Hongloumeng and the Nameless Empire
Tina L. Lu, University of Pennsylvania
In the first chapter, the monk Vanitas challenges the value of the story on the stone by pointing out what it lacks: a worthy social message and any mention of a specific dynasty or date. The novel, as has been noticed for centuries, scrupulously withholds any sense of historical particularity. The scholar looks in vain for the identity of the Emperor married to the eldest sister Yuanchun or the dynasty the Jia clan has served with such distinction for a century. In an empire, historical vagueness necessarily makes for geographical vagueness too; if one knew where the story was, one might deduce when it was too. But the novel takes place neither in Nanjing nor Beijing, but instead in some imaginary space that shares the imperial grandeur of the northern capital and the decadent splendor of the southern.
Critics have long regarded as accidental the contradictions and peculiar omissions that mark the novel’s avoidance of historical and geographical specificity, either as redactorial mistakes or as measure of the authors’ desire to avoid the scrutiny of overeager Qing censors. My paper will consider some of the consequences of a fictional world without political specificity. For in the Chinese dramatic and fictional traditions, Hongloumeng is as far as I know unique; whether ironically or in dead seriousness, all other works position themselves in a specific dynastic moment and at a specific locale. What sort of polity exists beyond the walls of the Daguan yuan, how does it intrude into the lives of the Jia clan, and finally, why does it remain nameless?
Hongloumeng as Open Fiction: For An Open Paradigm of Redology
Ming Dong Gu, University of Chicago
This paper will examine an aspect of the Hongloumeng which concerns the creation of and relationship between the Land of Illusion and the Total Vision Garden. I begin my study with an examination of a claim made by scholars of various schools and approaches, especially feminist critics: the Land of Illusion and its earthly replica are Cao Xueqin’s imaginative creation of an ideal microcosm, a utopia, a female kingdom, a female pure-land, and a protective fortress for girls. The claim offers an interesting perspective to read the novel, but it blurs and blinds a significant aspect of Cao’s creative vision. I wish to argue that contrary to the positive evaluation of the Land of Illusion and the Daguanyuan, the author’s purpose in creating the Land of Illusion and the Daguanyuan is perhaps not to create an ideal enclave for girls to escape male dominance but to present a hyperreal portrayal of conditions of women in male-dominated Chinese society.
The Land of Illusion (and its counterpart Daguanyuan), I venture to argue, despite as exclusively female inhabitants and seemingly female dominance, is a male sphere of influence in the same way an imperial harem, a wealthy family’s boudoir, a brothel, or a nunnery is a place of male power. To be put in more exact terms, it is a female sphere of male influence. Its creation is an artistic way on the part of the author to show the total and totalizing control by the male order and the visible and invisible, ever present and all pervasive influence of male power, even in the most intimate and characteristic part of female space. While the Land of Illusion represents the abstracted form of the male power, its counterpart, Daguanyuan is an artistically detailed concretization of male subjugation of the female. This, however, may not be the author’s ultimate vision. Cao Xueqin’s ultimate vision may be a vision about creativity which is "openness of fiction." Through some detailed analysis, I will demonstrate that the Land of Illusion and Daguanyuan are simulacra with multivalent associations ranging from the imperial palace, imperial harem, courtesan’s house, fairyland, heaven, hell, boudoir, nunnery, prison, school, sanitarium, lunatic house, and even concentration camp.
The different and contradictory prototypical images the Land of Illusion and Daguayuan evoke in my reading convinces me that the Hongloumeng is an open novel for open readings. As a literary text created by language codes it is endowed with a complexity which exemplifies a writing tendency found in the modern conception of the novel. Cao Xueqin was not exclusively engaged in writing a realistic novel which represents a reality he either observed or imagined, but he was engaged in writing a narrative which employs a language which he conceived of as "signification" and "simulation" in addition to "representation." The signification and simulation through the operations of language codes is the source of the novel’s multivalence and polysemy. There is sufficient evidence to show that Cao Xueqin did not mean to write his novel as a closure, nor does the interaction of signs consign it to be. We, therefore, ought to approach the novel as an open system with an open mind. We need, above all, an open paradigm which fully recognizes the novel as a configurated space of semiosis and simulation in addition to mimesis.
The Visual World of The Story of the Stone
Dore J. Levy, Brown University
The Story of the Stone, by Cao Xueqin (1715?–1763), is widely hailed as a compendium of late imperial Chinese culture, admired for its realistic depiction of the life of the nobility during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). The lavish detail of the material environment of the Jia family is probably our most complete picture of the relation of art and daily life in Chinese society. Idealized as this picture may be, the imagination that produced this image of almost unimaginable luxury and refinement drew upon conventions of the role of art in life to create an ideal, waiting to be shattered in the name of the hero’s liberation from the coils of human attachments.
In the macrocosm, The Story of the Stone seeks to reproduce the visual culture of a world now regarded by its creator with nostalgia and regret. The overriding, structuring image of the world in the novel is the garden paradise, the "Garden of Total Vision" (Daguan yuan), which becomes its center. The Garden, however, is a work of art within the larger work of art—the novel. What the adults see as a site for a unique formal occasion, the children will find to be a universe. Indeed, it is a universe: not least because the description of the buildings, promenades, waterways and pools, hills and dales, and most abundantly the plants, symbolically represent all the elements of the environment of a vastly wealthy and privileged gentry family. Its precise detail of the application of theories of aesthetics, cosmology, and horticulture produces a timeless vision of the ultimate garden of the mind.
The Garden of Total Vision encompasses the world of the protagonists physically and metaphorically. Within that world, the works of art that Bao-yu and his companions encounter as quotidian elements of their daily lives vibrate with metaphorical significance of which the protagonists are usually unaware. Luxury of fabric and furnishing, objects by famous artists, even objects imported from Europe, persistently embody a world about to collapse, to be re-visioned in later ages only in the pages of the novel. The extraordinary attachment to this world which The Story of the Stone arouses in its readers relies upon the author’s loving curatorship of the art objects depicted, and aids the reader not only in appreciating the nature of that world, but in achieving liberation from its ultimate illusion.
The Echo of Stones
Liangyan Ge, University of Notre Dame
In a sense, the narrative of the stone rejected from Nüwa’s project of heaven mending in the opening section of the Hongloumeng can be read as a full-blown dufa (how to read) essay by the author instead of a pingdian commentator. While serving as an account of the origin of the fiction, the story treats a whole set of novelistic relationships: the ones between fiction and reality, between the work and its reader, between text and textual transmission, and between author and narrator. My paper considers the "stone theory" in Hongloumeng in an intertextual fabric, in conjunction with its three close precursors from the late Ming and early Qing, all using stone symbolism in their treatment of the relations in the creation and reception of fiction.
In Feng Menglong’s preface to Shi diantou (Stone nodding head) the edifying potency of fiction is compared to that of an eminent monk’s storytelling which supposedly moved a stone to nodding. This model of literary reception, with a stone representing an understanding audience to a preaching monk, receives an interesting twist in Cao Xueqin’s hand. The stone in Hongloumeng, having the record of its experience in the world of Red Dust carved on its surface, becomes a text. While the completion of its human incarnation sends the stone back into the "stony" stillness, the literary text about such an incarnation promises a dynamic and enduring life, and the first reader to be captivated by its efficacy is a Taoist priest, Vanitas, who is converted—or deconverted—into a believer in erotics.
In adopting the stone as a symbol for the text, the first chapter of Hongloumeng resonates with the anonymous foreword to Zui xing shi, which claims for the stories in the collection such a transforming power on the reader as that of a magic stone that sobers up any drunkard who leans on it, as the title of the collection suggests. Yet, in Hongloumeng, the story of the stone serves as an "meta-narrative," and the text carved on the stone is after all a text within a text, a fictional text within a text of fiction. Such a stratification of different narrative levels provides a living space for irony and renders the recurring epithets in relation to the "stone effect"—such as ling (intelligent), chun (stupid), dai (moronic), feng (crazy), and others—largely problematic.
Biliange zhuren’s preface to Wu se shi (Five Color Stone) and the stone story in Hongloumeng parallel each other as both are based on the Nüwa myth. As the preface claims, the writer of fiction emulates the goddess, and the writing of fiction becomes his stone for repairing the "intangible" heavenly vault, that is, the morals. The positive model of Nüwa in the preface, however, is turned into an agent of negativity in Hongloumeng, where the genesis of the fiction is contingent on the goddess’ judgment of the stone as inferior and superfluous and her dismissal of it from the supposedly lofty task of heaven mending.
While the stone story in Hongloumeng is a continuation of the tradition, it clearly exerts a revising power on its precursors in stone symbolism. The stone imagery no longer serves to highlight the didactic function of literary writing; instead, the stone dismissed from a utilitarian mission symbolizes a new notion of literature as an autonomous institution emancipated from the encumberment of blatant moral teaching. Cao Xueqin aims at a poetics of fiction which focuses on relations more aesthetic than social. After all, a novel is no more than a novel, as a stone is no more than a stone.
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