The Story of the Stone (also called Dream of the Red Chamber)

"Like Lu Xun for the modern literary tradition, if you ask scholars – or most people in China – for the greatest novel in the classical tradition, there are generally four novels of the Ming and Qing that are venerated. This is the most recent. It’s a very long and complex novel, and hard to summarise. For me, in the literary tradition of the whole world, this book along with two others – The Tale of Genji from Japan in the 11th century, and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past from France in the 20th century – are the three works in which the experience of reading the novel is genuinely an experience. It becomes a world in which you can live and get lost. As you read through each chapter it feels like you are going through what the characters are going through. Like Lu Xun but in a very different way, this book is critical of the social world and the Confucian tradition that informs it. It’s about Confucianism and its discontents. The story is of a young man by the name of Jia Baoyu, who comes from a great family which is on the decline. He is just about the most un-Confucian person you can imagine. He’s effeminate, he associates largely with women, he’s not very good at fulfilling his social duties, he’s not a very good student of the Confucian classics. His head is full of poetry and beauty, and the clothing and fragrances of his female cousins, but he is confronted with a social world in which what you really need to do is study hard to become a Confucian official. That is the hardest thing for him to do, to fit in with this society and be a success in the way his family wants him to be. It’s about people living in a society and not quite fitting in. The book is also a wonderful way to discover what are called the three traditions in China: Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. It’s infused with all three of these traditions working themselves out. There’s a lot of Buddhist influence, in terms of defining a world which is a fleeting illusion we want to transcend. Jia Baoyu goes through all of these experiences in his life, but he eventually makes good. As happens in a lot in Chinese literature, he comes out at the top of the imperial exam and is given a great imperial post. But he ends up giving it all up to become a monk. That is a great paradigm in East Asian literature – at the point that you achieve the greatest success, you realise that this world of attainment and achievement is really quite empty. Then you long for something deeper, renounce your success, material goods and education, and become, in this case, a Buddhist monk. There is. He falls in love very deeply with a cousin of his, Lin Daiyu, who is a very sickly, frail girl. The whole book has an interesting frame. Jia Baoyu starts out as a magical stone in a metaphysical realm that comes down to earth. Lin Daiyu is the descendant of a flower that also comes out of this dream world into what is often referred to in the book as “the red dust” of the human world. She’s not really ready to live in this world, and dies very young from weakness. That’s kind of an aesthetic in East Asian literature – women whose beauty is in their delicateness and fragility. She actually dies because Jia Baoyu is tricked into marrying another cousin of his, who is a more Confucian picture of what the good wife should be – social, capable, robust, energetic, someone who can take care of her husband. But Jia Baoyu doesn’t want that, he wants the frail cousin. The choice is forced upon him to reject his desires and do what his family wants him to, which is to marry the more socially acceptable woman. It’s more commonly known as The Dream of the Red Chamber , and it’s sometimes translated as The Dream of the Red Mansions . It is very much the War and Peace of China, just as The Tale of Genji is the War and Peace of Japan. This book, The Tale of Genji and another book written in Korea in the 17th century called The Cloud Dream of the Nine , are actually very interesting to look at together. They all have male characters who are not of this world – they’re somewhat frail, somewhat connected to a transcendent or metaphysical world, and they all end up becoming monks and looking for something more important. The Story of the Stone is wonderful to look at in this larger East Asian context, because it shows the way people thought about the world in terms of these same traditions – Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. Confucianism told people how to live in the social world and how to live with each other. Daoism asked: “How do I live with nature, with my environment?” Buddhism brought something else when it came into East Asia heavily in the 7th and 8th centuries, the question: “How do I live with myself, with my emotions, my despair, my fear, my pain, my sadness?” These books do a wonderful job of showing why those three traditions all had to come together for people in East Asia to have a comprehensive view and experience of the world in which they were living. I think a lot of it has to do with the history of translation. There are a lot more translations of War and Peace than there are for The Story of the Stone . At this stage, there just hasn’t been enough of a history of translation of Chinese literature into English. Chinese writers are much less known than their Russian counterparts, who were participating in a more European tradition. But it’s really about the lack of translations. This translation of The Story of the Stone by David Hawkes and John Minford is definitely the most complete and the best one that’s currently available, but I think it could be improved. Many of the great works of Chinese literature have now been translated, but probably not as well as some of the great Russian writers have been. I hope that’s something we’re going to see change in the near future."

"This book is believed by many to be the greatest Chinese novel ever written. For me it is like a bible for everything to do with Chinese culture. Cao belonged to the Han Chinese clan and the book is a huge family novel written in the 18th century. The family’s fortunes were tied up with the Kangxi dynasty and the book is all about the relationship between the family members and all the different classes. It really is a wonderful book which has been translated by Penguin since 1970 and reprinted again and again. But many Westerners don’t know about this book, which is a shame because it is such a powerful book which I really love. Well, it is such a good guide to our culture. In the book more than 100 people, buildings, poems, paintings and dreams are described in great detail. So you really find out the lifestyles of the people living there. I have read this book again and again ever since my childhood. For example, there is a part which sums up how important food is in Chinese society. Xueqin writes about an aubergine recipe, which is a famous dish in the book, where the mother describes to her daughter and grandchildren how you need to wash the aubergines in snow, soak them with spring dew, pickle them with flowers from summer to season them and the thorns from autumn. And these are known as four-season aubergines. That is so beautiful. And why I think this book is so important is because it has helped Chinese culture to survive despite all the political upheavals and civil wars which have taken place since it was written. Books like this remind Chinese people what the true Chinese culture is all about and how to preserve it, which is why I call it the ‘Bible of Chinese Culture’. Actually, many people try to copy this way of life even now."