The Novel

by Steven Moore

  45 See the anonymous commentator on the 1803 edition translated in Rolston’s How to Read the Chinese Novel, 258, 263.

  46 The Classic Chinese Novel, 204–5, 209, 215, 241. Nevertheless Hsia condemns what he considers flaws in the novel, mainly some silly scenes that sound “a note of burlesque and buffoonery that ill suits the serious comic portrayal of manners to be seen in the bulk of the novel” (219). But some critics say the same thing about Pynchon’s novels; which is to say, these are not necessarily flaws.

  47 Levy, Ideal and Actual in The Story of the Stone, 1—a highly recommended introduction for those entering the portals of the Dream for the first time. And for exquisite visual introductions, fatten your eyes on photographer Linda Ching’s Story of the Stone (Ten Speed Press, 1998), and on A Dream of Red Mansions as Portrayed through the Brush of Sun Wen (Better Link Press, 2010), a 19th-century portfolio of silk paintings.

  48 Chan, The Authorship of The Dream of the Red Chamber, viii.

  49 Hawkes, “The Translator, the Mirror and the Dream,” 17, 20.

  50 Hawkes translated chapters 1–80 in three volumes (1973–80); his son-in-law John Minford translated chapters 81–120 in two volumes (1982–86). Their translation will be cited by chapter except for editorial matter, which will be cited by volume/page. The Yangs’ translation is rather flat (like their Scholars), though more literal and fuller in spots.

  51 Miller, Masks of Fiction in Dream of the Red Chamber, 33 n63. Miller’s book is especially good at explicating the novel’s complicated opening chapter.

  52 The yu element common to their names primarily means “jade”—he’s Precious Jade, she’s Black Jade—but also means “desire,” the thorn in the side of this novel. Plaks notes “the ‘jade’ of classical Chinese literature is milky-white and opalescent, unlike the greenish rock of Western jewellery” (“Leaving the Garden,” 125).

  53 The Classic Chinese Novel, 268.

  54 The narrator doesn’t tell us the gap was made by a disruptive demon, but Chinese readers would have known the myth. (For more on Nu Wa and stone symbolism in DRM, see Wang’s Story of Stone.) The personification of the unwanted stone goes back to at least the 12th century; see Xin Qiji’s poem translated in Li’s Fictions of Enlightenment, 111–12.

  55 Or elsewhere. Cao evidently knew The Plum in the Golden Vase—the closest Chinese predecessor to his own novel—but avoids imitating its graphic sex scenes.

  56 For more on this, see Gu’s Chinese Theories of Fiction, 169–79.

  57 Here’s Bao-yu’s clever maid Aroma on his religious conversion: “As for all that stuff about immortality, that’s just a lot of hot air. Who ever actually saw an immortal set foot in this word of ours? Some monk turns up from goodness knows where, talking a lot of rubbish, and you go and take him seriously! You’re an educated man, surely you don’t give more weight to his words than you do to the Master’s and Her Ladyship’s?” (118). I agree with Martin Huang that Bao-yu’s taking of Buddhist vows “can hardly be regarded as a genuine conversion. His motive for this action is his disappointment at his present situation rather than a positive faith in religion” (Literati and Self-Re/Presentation, 107–8). But for an intelligent reading of the novel as a Buddhist sutra, see chap. 5 of Li’s Fictions of Enlightenment.

  58 Hawkes, introduction to vol. 1, 23.

  59 Of Cao’s personal life, we know he had a son who died a few months before he did. “One of his friends mentions that he left a ‘new wife’ behind, which seems to imply that he was twice married and that the son he lost was his child by the first wife” (Hawkes 1:22). But in Chinese society homosexuals were tolerated as long as they did their conjugal duty, so who knows?

  60 Huang, Literati and Self-Re/Presentation, 93. Huang is excellent on the gender dynamics in DRM, connecting them with the dependent, “feminine” position of literati like Cao during this period.

  61 The Yangs, whose translation I am quoting here (because Hawkes abridges this key passage), don’t identify these works. The Lament (Li sao) is a dramatic monologue attributed to Qu Yuan (c. 340–278 bce), and like The Nine Arguments is from the Chu-ci, an anthology of poems from the early Chu kingdom. The Autumn Flood is presumably chapter 17 of the eponymous book by Zhuangzi (4th cent. bce), a quirky Daoist classic filled with tales and anecdotes that Bao-yu is often seen reading.

  62 Rereading the Stone, 132.

  63 See chapters 4 and 5 of Huang’s Snakes’ Legs for accounts of these, if interested.

  64 See chapter 2 of her Feminist Utopian Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Chinese and English Fiction, where she compares it to Lennox’s Female Quixote.

  65 Hsia, “The Scholar-Novelist and Chinese Culture” (1977), rpt. in On Chinese Literature, 190.

  66 Since it hasn’t been translated, my brief discussion of this novel is based on McMahon’s Shrews, Misers, and Polygamists (150–75), both Huang’s Literati and Self-Re/Presentation (109–42) and Desire and Fictional Narrative (236–51), and Roddy’s Literati Identity (149–70).

  67 From Lin Tai-yi’s heavily abridged translation, p. 536 in the bilingual Yilin Press edition (hereafter cited by page; the Chinese text occupies pp. 1–527, the translation pp. 529–896). Lin’s translation, first published in 1965, represents a little over a third of the original; in the early years of this century she was given the opportunity to complete it, but she obdurately insisted her abridged version contained the essence of the novel, and that the rest merely has “to do with classical texts and discussions of the Chinese language, dissertations on history, poetry, phonetics, etc., which can be of little interest to the non-specialized reader” (17). Foiled again by a condescending translator! (She even abridges the title, which should be The Destiny [yuan] of Flowers in the Mirror.) I’ve also drawn on fuller (but not complete) translations by H. C. Chang of chapters 32–37 and 96–100. To avoid confusion, all references to chapter numbers are to the 100-chapter Chinese original.

  68 It’s worth noting that here, as in DRM, the book is said to originate in the supernatural realm. In China, they call such heaven-sent books novels; in the Near East and West, they call them sacred scriptures. See Ying Wang’s essay “The Supernatural as the Author’s Sphere” for the Chinese recognition that the supernatural is not only a product of the imagination but a metaphor for the artist’s workshop.

  69 Accordingly, “Feminism as Illusion” is the title of Ma’s chapter on this aspect of the novel.

  70 Page 530; the images also appear in a song in chap. 5 of DRM. Ying Wang notes these images were also used by the Chinese to describe fiction itself (142 n31).

  71 Not Li’s invention but the work of a fourth-century poetess named Su Hui. She wrote it to win her husband back from a concubine. (It worked.)

  72 “The Scholar-Novelist and Chinese Culture,” 208—a fine essay on both the strengths and weakness of Flowers in the Mirror.

  73 “Jinghua yuan: Where the Late Late Ming Meets the Early Late Qing,” in Wang and Wei, 274. Epstein has made the best case for the novel’s structural integrity (via yin-yang symbolism) in “Engendering Order.”

  74 In his Songso pokpu ko, quoted by Lee in A History of Korean Literature, 333.

  75 Page 125 in Pihl’s translation, which occupies pp. 119–47 of Lee’s Anthology of Korean Literature. (Here, as elsewhere, I’m dropping the diacritical marks: e.g., Hŏ Kyun, Hong Kiltong chŏn, etc.)

  76 In 1592, a megalomaniacal Japanese warlord named Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea with the idea of moving on to conquer China and the world. The unprepared Koreans sustained enormous losses at first, but with China’s help managed to repulse the enemy and secure a truce in 1593. The despicable Hideyoshi then ordered a second, retaliatory attack on the Koreans, who defeated his forces in 1598 at a decisive naval battle. Though ultimately victorious, the Koreans suffered death and destruction—human, structural, cultural—on an unprecedented scale, and the war initiated their prejudice against Japan that persists to this day. (Japan has done much to Korea since then to
deserve this sustained prejudice.) During the Japanese occupation (1910–45), it was dangerous for a Korean to be caught with a copy of the Record.

  77 Pages 88–89 in Peter H. Lee’s translation. (The novella exists in many different versions; Lee says the one he translated is typical; there is no definitive version.) Lee, by the way, has done more than anyone to make classic Korean literature available to English-speaking audiences.

  78 Some, like Francisca Cho Bantly in Embracing Illusion, consider the novel a serious philosophical work, while others, like Chang Sik Yun in a dissenting essay, criticize it for not being serious enough.

  79 Page 18 in Rutt’s anthology Virtuous Women, where the novella occupies pp. 16–177. Although it lacks notes and compresses Kim’s 16 chapters into seven, Rutt’s translation is far superior to the one by the Reverend James S. Gale (1922), which is unfortunately the only one in print. A Christian missionary in Korea, Gale not only sanitized the novel’s many premarital sex scenes, but also falsified the text by increasing the ages of the protagonists. As disturbed as most Westerners at the idea that humans develop sexual urges at puberty, he fake-ID’d the novel’s junior-high lovers into college freshwomen.

  80 (Insert joke here about Shao-yu plowing the East forty.)

  81 See Bantley (45–61) for more on this novel.

  82 Page 185 in Kim Chong-un’s translation, which occupies pp. 185–233.

  83 In his bibliography under “Fiction,” Lee lists the genre-defying Hanjungnok (1795–1805)—literally “Records Written in Silence” but available in English as The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong (U California P, 1996)—by a woman who endured the intrigues of Korean royal politics. Though traditionally categorized as a court novel, Hyegyong deliberately wrote the four memoirs that comprise the work as a defense of her family, which is why it is currently categorized as history. Having read about half of it, I agree that it belongs there; the author was familiar with court novels and could have cast her memoirs in that form had she wished, but she had a different agenda. It’s a remarkable work nonetheless, and recommended to students of women’s autobiographies.

  84 Hibbett, The Floating World in Japanese Fiction, 3.

  85 Quoted in Shirane’s Early Modern Japanese Literature, 30. These lines are quoted in every book on ukiyo-e art, but the novel itself has never been translated in full, for some inexplicable reason.

  86 Keene, World within Walls, 174.

  87 A quick reminder that in pre-Christian Japan (as elsewhere in Asia), not only was prostitution not considered immoral, but courtesans were accepted members of society, especially in the big cities like Kyoto, Osaka, and Edo (Tokyo). Their beauty, talent, intelligence, and charm meant that “courtesans were held in higher esteem than were the wholesome married women and their daughters” (Kobayashi Tadashi, “Edo Society and Culture,” in Morse’s Drama and Desire, 21).

  88 Young itinerant male prostitutes were called tobiko—literally “flying (traveling) children”—and Robert Lyons Danly has translated the episode of Yonosuke’s first encounter with them as “Flyboys” in Miller’s Partings at Dawn, 94–95. More historical context: “During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, homosexual relationships among men were accepted at all levels of society. In the male-dominated world of Edo, where marriage with women was a contractual rather than an emotional bond, many members of the military aristocracy retained young men not only as loyal servants but also as bed partners. Others patronized young actors who were open to sexual liaisons (iroko) and who by their profession cultivated particularly alluring feminine appearances, or they sought out boy prostitutes (kagema) in the city’s brothel districts . . .” (Asana Sugo, “Courtesans, Geisha, and Male Prostitutes,” in Morse, 47).

  89 As translated by Christopher Drake in Early Modern Japanese Literature, 50 (from chap. 1). Drake translates three chapters from the novel, which are vastly superior to the only complete English translation available, that by Kenji Hamada (which I will reluctantly cite by page number hereafter). Hamada doesn’t even include this sentence in his version, which reduces the original’s 54 chapters to 49 and settles for conveying the “gist” of the narrative (as he calls it) rather than replicating its innovative style.

  90 From Morris’s introduction to Saikaku’s Life of an Amorous Woman, 10.

  91 The names of real people are scattered through the novel, which must have given its first readers a jolt, habituated to reading older novels filled with fictitious and/or historical characters.

  92 One of them, Five Women Who Loved Love (1686), is sometimes called a novel, but it’s a collection of five novelettes connected only by a common theme. It’s one of Saikaku’s finest works and is available in a fluent translation by William Theodore de Bary (1956).

  93 Book 1, chapter 1 in Morris’s translation, which occupies pp. 121–208 of The Life of an Amorous Woman and Other Writings. Unfortunately, he translates only 14 of the novel’s 24 chapters; two of the excluded chapters can be found in Hibbett’s Floating World in Japanese Fiction, where he translates 10 of the novel’s chapters (154–217). Drake translates 12 chapters in Early Modern Japanese Literature (83–120), but the same ones as the other two. (The novel is only about 150 pages long; it’s ridiculous that no one has done the whole thing.) Hibbett’s translation is probably the best, but since Morris’s is fuller and more accessible (not to mention copiously annotated), I’ll cite it by book/chapter.

  94 Hibbett has an interesting essay comparing the two (“Saikaku and Burlesque Fiction”), and finds the Amorous Woman superior to Moll Flanders.

  95 In previous chapters I’ve used the year 1800 as the terminus for the early-modern period, but since Japan didn’t embrace modernity until Commodore Perry forced it upon them in the 1850s, I’m going to conclude this section with one or two examples of each of these genres from the early 19th century.

  96 Page 237 in Satchell’s translation (1929). His title comes from the old idiom “to ride shank’s mare,” meaning to walk, and parallels the Japanese idiom hizakurige ([to ride the] knee chestnut horse).

  97 Rimer, Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions, 95. (The Tokugawa family of shoguns ruled Japan from 1600 to 1867.) Zolbrod made the same observation earlier in the only book-length study of Bakin in English to date (67–68).

  98 Translated selections can be found in Keene’s Anthology of Japanese Literature (423–28) and Shirane’s Early Modern Japanese Literature (889–909).

  99 The publisher of the later edition I read states the “translation is, on the whole, very faithful to the letter of the original” (5), while in his preface Greey claims his work, “which, while not a translation, follows Bakin’s charming romance as closely as possible, in his own quaint style, and contains many details that author would have given had he written for foreign readers” (9), meaning it’s impossible to tell what Bakin wrote and what Greey added “for foreign readers.” Subsequent references will be to chapters.

  100 In a later episode, Bakin likewise winks at the bookish nature of his novel when Saikei stumbles upon a large palace in an unexpected setting: “Strange thing! I must be dreaming,” the priest exclaims. “This place is like one of the old Chinese palaces in the story-books” (13).

  101 Shikikei Sanba and the Comic Tradition in Edo Fiction, 95. His enjoyable translation occupies pp. 137–92.

  102 He is thought to have been assisted by a female writer/musician named Kiyomoto Nobutsuga, who first-drafted the women’s dialogue and helped with the musical elements (Early Modern Japanese Literature, 762). There’s a Nobutsuga mentioned in the novel a few times, but it’s unclear whether that’s her.

  103 From Woodhull’s translation (typography modified), which occupies pp. 197–351 of his dissertation, and hereafter cited by chapter. The Japanese original seems to have the stage directions printed in smaller type at the top of the pages.

  104 Usually sharebon, satiric novels set in the licensed quarter, and which the government often persecuted. Shunsui didn’t escape punish
ment: in 1841, he was arrested for his writings and many of them burned.

  105 It occupies pp. 81–439 of Cyrus Stearns’s King of the Empty Plain (2007), a superb example of scholarly translation; “Lochen” is a title meaning “Great Translator,” a title Stearns deserves as well. Unfortunately, like many Tibetan scholars, Lochen Stearns often displays the gullibility of a child toward his material.

  106 Page 150. The original is one long text, but Stearns divided it into 15 chapters.

  107 Page 317 in Beth Newman’s fluent translation. She broke the uninterrupted text into forty chapters and substituted Sanskrit for the ungainly Tibetan names (witness the author’s name above), but otherwise seems to have followed the original closely.

  108 Author Tshe ring dbang rgyal had to make the same decision at age 14, and opted for public life, eventually becoming prime minister and the second-most powerful man in Tibet.

  109 Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), founder of the modern Islamic movement that spawned al-Qaeda, visited the United States in 1948 and more than anything else was put off by the sexual vitality of American women: “A girl looks at you,” he later wrote, “appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume but flesh, only flesh” (quoted in Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 [NY: Knopf, 2006], 12).

  110 See Arbuthnot’s Persian Portraits (119–30) for a summary and sample translation. Clouston’s Eastern Romances contains several self-contained selections in translation (3–190, 355–452).

  111 It occupies pp. 236–352 of Clouston’s Eastern Romances.

  112 No relation to the Persian Taj al-Muluk of King Umar al-Numan and His Two Remarkable Sons, a novel within The Arabian Nights.

  113 From the Qazvini-i/Rice translation, 22. This is a lovely prose translation of the poetic original.

  114 The story of the manuscript is told in the translators’ introduction, but as this takes the form of a memoir, it’s hard to vouch for its verity. Further information on this novel has eluded me.