Being a parent affords a number of benefits. One of the sweetest perks that comes with parenthood is the ability to unashamedly enjoy kids movies and television shows. Since I became a father, I have particularly enjoyed the films produced by Pixar Studios (okay, so I have enjoyed them since long before I had children; now I just have a legitimate excuse). In a period in which children’s television and movies are dominated by either the mindlessly stupid (Spongebob) or the didactically liberal (Sesame Street, Happy Feet), Pixar consistently produces films that are morally serious and emotionally affecting. Perhaps more importantly, the films do not drip the blind progressivism of their usually inferior counterparts from other studios. By and large they feature realistic and complicated characters faced with consequential choices, characters who are—despite living in fantasy worlds often far removed from the real world—stunningly and delightfully human.
Many of Pixar’s films treat themes of special urgency in modern society—the threat of tyranny within democratic societies; the “chronological snobbery” identified by Lewis and Barfield that almost invariably characterizes today’s youth—with surprising sophistication and sensitivity. Toy Story 3 and WALL-E in particular, stand out for the admirable way in which they handle important questions about how modern society can tend towards tyranny.
In Toy Story 3, the main characters, toys dealing with the threat of their longtime owner growing up and forgetting them, find themselves accidentally donated to Sunnyside Daycare. Sunnyside at first seems a heaven for the toys, who have been relegated to the toy bin during their owner’s teenage years. At daycare they can look forward to playtime five days a week with fresh and lively children.
Unfortunately, what at first seems to be the perfect place for forgotten toys turns out to be a prison run by Lotso Huggin’ Bear, a cast off and bitter teddy who smells of strawberries. While Lotso acts the part of a cuddly old bear who walks with a cane and speaks with a soothing southern drawl, he turns out to be an embittered nihilist who treats those closest to him with contempt, who can only interact with other toys by fear and coercion.
Lotso’s will to dominate those around him is a direct result of his terminal pessimism. Like many dictators, Lotso’s view of his fellow toys is materialistic—and thus nihilistic: “We're all just trash waiting to be thrown away! That's all a toy is!” Lotso must exert power over the toys at Sunnyside because that is all that remains for so complete a nihilist. He cannot have a real relationship with the other toys because meaningful relationships based upon mutual consent are not possible between “trash.”
Lotso was not always the villain that he became at Sunnyside. His turn to pessimism came as a direct result of his being lost and replaced by his first owner, a young girl who was the love of Lotso’s life. When the girl accidentally leaves him by the side of the road, Lotso walks for days until he returns to her house, where he finds that she has replaced him with an identical teddy.
Lotso’s devastation ultimately colors his view of all toys. Because the most important relationship in his life turned out unfortunately, Lotso concludes that there is nothing worthwhile in the world except the exercise of power.
Although Toy Story 3 is too sophisticated to end with “the moral of the story,” Lotso’s life is a clear warning, and it is one that children need to hear in today’s world—a world in which institutions and bureaucracies create blanket policies that regulate all for the mistakes of a few; where long-cherished institutions like the family are regarded as failed and false because some people have been abused by their families; where loyalty is discounted because some people are disloyal; where honesty is viewed with suspicion because some people lie. Tyranny—whether on a large or small scale—will always result from such approaches to human society.
A very different film, WALL-E explores another ground in which the tyrannical urge can root and grow. In the distant future, the earth has become overrun with trash and all humans have escaped into deep space on huge starliners. The starliners counterfeit many features of earthly human life, but the people themselves have become so dependent upon technology that they hardly resemble humanity at all: they are so enormously fat that they cannot walk, and they communicate with other people by electronic means only, even when they are right next to each other. The humans have become too comfortable for responsibility: they are happy to allow robots and computers to do everything for them. The captains of the starliners, for example, have no real responsibility for the ships they run. The ship’s centralized computers have real control over both the ships and the lives of their passengers.
It is ironic—or perhaps even fitting—that such a warning about the tendency of technology to lead to complacency and finally to tyranny should come from a studio that produces computer-animated films (not to mention that Steve Jobs was at one time Pixar’s CEO). The studio deserves tremendous praise for giving such a warning about the risks inherent in technological societies through a children’s movie. This is especially apparent when one considers that we live in an age when many kindergarteners are using tablet computers in their classes.
By all relevant criteria, Pixar’s films are far superior to comparable offerings in children’s films. Films like WALL-E, Cars, and the Toy Story series exhibit the best qualities of any art, children’s or otherwise. They consistently offer excellence of craft, delight for the mind and the senses, and incisive and relevant commentary on issues that become increasingly important in modern society.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Shakespeare's Language of Love
From almost the beginning of his career, Shakespeare seems to have been fascinated with language. In part, this fascination seems theoretical: in Love's Labour's Lost, for instance, when the Princess toys with the Forester, who is teaching her how to shoot a bow, she indicates by toying on the word "fair," that language contains inherent ambiguity, a point that he not infrequently visits later, from Portia's technical exploitation of the verbal imprecision of the bond in The Merchant of Venice to Feste's banter with Viola in Twelfth Night in which he deliberately takes her use of the preposition "by" in a meaning different from that which she intended.
But while Shakespeare is always alive to the theoretical implications of the matter of his plays, he never rests in them; the practical implications of these themes seem always uppermost in his mind. In Much Ado about Nothing, for instance, he seems quite alive to the theoretical questions of epistemology that troubled the Renaissance (and have disturbed our philosophical dreams ever since), but he shows still more interest in the practical problems posed by epistemological uncertainty in everyday life: if it is difficult to know another, then we may well--to our great cost--attach ourselves to those who while acting as friends end up inflicting considerable pain. This concern with the practical questions of life is perhaps the chief hallmark of Shakespeare and gives rise to his complex vision of life as it is in all its glorious and ungovernable particularity that the best of critics, from Samuel Johnson onward, have found at the heart of all his work.
And his concern with language, while sensitive to theoretical problems, is similarly practical. For the twentieth-century French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, language is in large part a fundamental expression of love, an extension of that concern of each individual with the other that precedes all philosophical thought, and such seems to be the same for Shakespeare. An almost randomly-selected minor line serves as a powerful clue: in Merchant, Gratiano says to Antonio in the first scene, "I'll tell thee what, Antonio--and 'tis my love that speaks," an admission that the primary point of language is to express love. Shakespeare returns to the point several times in the play, as when the villainous Shylock uses the language of the bond not to express love for another but for his own purposes, a pattern that reaches a climax in the court room, when implicit to Portia's argument is the idea that language, like more financial means of currency, should be used not primarily for one's own benefit but with an eye toward the welfare of others. Thus in 3.3, when Antonio wishes to speak to Shylock, the latter responds with a curt "I'll not hear thee speak, I'll have my bond." In the same way, in Much Ado, Don John, the sole locus of evil in the play, who desires to thwart others' love, greets Leonato by saying only "I am of few words, but I thank you." Beatrice and Benedick, while speaking a great deal, can never speak too much, for speech, rightly used, is an expression of love, something that Claudio and Hero, who say very little to one another in the play, learn to their great cost.
Of course Shakespeare would be alive to the importance of language, for he worked in words and was the greatest master of them in one of the world's richest languages. And his own torrent of words, pouring forth daily from the mouths of his characters in his plays, remind us that those words, whether we read them on the page or hear them spoken by men and women whose characters have been called into existence by Shakespeare's creating words, are themselves Shakespeare's act of love for all who will listen.
But while Shakespeare is always alive to the theoretical implications of the matter of his plays, he never rests in them; the practical implications of these themes seem always uppermost in his mind. In Much Ado about Nothing, for instance, he seems quite alive to the theoretical questions of epistemology that troubled the Renaissance (and have disturbed our philosophical dreams ever since), but he shows still more interest in the practical problems posed by epistemological uncertainty in everyday life: if it is difficult to know another, then we may well--to our great cost--attach ourselves to those who while acting as friends end up inflicting considerable pain. This concern with the practical questions of life is perhaps the chief hallmark of Shakespeare and gives rise to his complex vision of life as it is in all its glorious and ungovernable particularity that the best of critics, from Samuel Johnson onward, have found at the heart of all his work.
And his concern with language, while sensitive to theoretical problems, is similarly practical. For the twentieth-century French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, language is in large part a fundamental expression of love, an extension of that concern of each individual with the other that precedes all philosophical thought, and such seems to be the same for Shakespeare. An almost randomly-selected minor line serves as a powerful clue: in Merchant, Gratiano says to Antonio in the first scene, "I'll tell thee what, Antonio--and 'tis my love that speaks," an admission that the primary point of language is to express love. Shakespeare returns to the point several times in the play, as when the villainous Shylock uses the language of the bond not to express love for another but for his own purposes, a pattern that reaches a climax in the court room, when implicit to Portia's argument is the idea that language, like more financial means of currency, should be used not primarily for one's own benefit but with an eye toward the welfare of others. Thus in 3.3, when Antonio wishes to speak to Shylock, the latter responds with a curt "I'll not hear thee speak, I'll have my bond." In the same way, in Much Ado, Don John, the sole locus of evil in the play, who desires to thwart others' love, greets Leonato by saying only "I am of few words, but I thank you." Beatrice and Benedick, while speaking a great deal, can never speak too much, for speech, rightly used, is an expression of love, something that Claudio and Hero, who say very little to one another in the play, learn to their great cost.
Of course Shakespeare would be alive to the importance of language, for he worked in words and was the greatest master of them in one of the world's richest languages. And his own torrent of words, pouring forth daily from the mouths of his characters in his plays, remind us that those words, whether we read them on the page or hear them spoken by men and women whose characters have been called into existence by Shakespeare's creating words, are themselves Shakespeare's act of love for all who will listen.
The Odyssey, Job, and Suffering
One might not at first notice any important similarities between the Book of Job and The Odyssey. They were probably written about four centuries apart—Job around the fourth century BC and The Odyssey around the eighth century BC—and the cultural perspectives of each piece is quite different: one comes down to us from a monotheistic tradition that emphasizes personal righteousness and humility before the One God while the other arose in a polytheistic culture that prized glory and honor above individual holiness. Whereas the one is a theodicy exclusively occupied with why the good suffer, the other tells the story of a Greek hero who returns home from the Trojan War by means of his intelligence, rhetorical skill, and the assistance of pagan deities. While we admire Odysseus for his wit and his ability to endure hardship, we pity Job for the sheer unfairness of his lot. The differences between the two works need not be exaggerated.
Yet one important thematic similarity between the two works emerges from a simple summary of the plots of the two books: both are about characters who must endure and overcome immense suffering. While it may not be the most obvious theme of Homer’s epic, The Odyssey grapples with the very same question that Job asks: why do people suffer when they do not deserve it? The first major example comes when Poseidon punishes Odysseus for blinding his son, Polyphemos. While certainly any parent will understand Poseidon’s rage at Odysseus for driving a sharpened pole into his son’s only eye, no one can deny that the Kyklops himself deserves the wound that Odysseus deals him. He has violated one of the most important moral obligations in The Odyssey: the obligation of a host to show good xenia to his guests. Not only does Polyphemos deny basic hospitality to Odysseus and his men; he violates nearly every imaginable moral obligation by eating several of Odysseus’s men. More importantly, Odysseus has little choice in the matter: he must either force the Kyklops to let him and his men go or be eaten.
Some may rightly argue that Odysseus’s pride complicates the matter of his culpability. When he sails out of Polyphemos’s reach, he shouts his name so that all will know who blinded the Kyklops. If he had remained anonymous, he would not have earned the wrath of Poseidon. But surely Poseidon’s punishment goes far beyond justice. Even if we do not forgive Odysseus his pride in taunting Polyphemos with his name, and even if we grant that Poseidon’s wrath is understandable, the justice of his actions towards Odysseus is dubious at best.
An even more striking example of the innocent suffering an unearned punishment comes in Book XIII, where Zeus allows Poseidon to punish the Phaiaikeans for showering Odysseus with gifts and giving him safe passage home. The parallels between this passage of the epic and the frame narrative of Job are quite striking. In both the Greek and the Biblical poems, we find people who are entirely blameless before men and God. The Phaiaikeans of The Odyssey practice impeccable xenia, which is one of the most important virtues and perhaps the only real moral absolute in the poem. Job, too, is virtuous and innocent of any wrongdoing. God Himself says of Job that “there is none like him on earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil” (1:8). Yet both the Phaiaikeans and Job are subjected to punishment in spite of their innocence. In the pagan story, Poseidon grudges the Phaiaikeans the assistance they provide Odysseus; in the biblical story, Satan begrudges God the righteousness of Job: “Put forth thy hand now, and touch all he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face” (1:11). Both Poseidon and Satan approach the supreme power—Zeus and God, respectively—and ask permission to inflict punishment on the righteous. Poseidon fulfills a prophesy given by Alkinoos’s father, saying that if the Phaiaikeans continue to offer xenia to every traveler who visits them, one of their mightiest ships will be turned into stone and their island will be surrounded with a mountain ring. Satan kills Job’s servants, livestock, and his children, and after that does not shake Job’s righteousness, he inflicts him “with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown” (2:7).
In both poems, the writer presents readers with people who suffer greatly for their devotion to righteousness. The fate of the Phaiaikeans (which at best means the loss of a ship and its crew) is a direct result of their devotion to perhaps the most important virtue in their ethical system: xenia. Similarly, Job’s fate results precisely from his righteousness. God allows Satan to torment and punish Job because he is blameless.
Both Homer and the author of Job acknowledge the bewildering fact that suffering often afflicts the innocent, but where the two works part ways is in the way each deals with that fact. Suffering provides the backdrop to The Odyssey, but that poem attempts no serious justification of the gods’ behavior towards men. Indeed, Homer entirely forgets the fate of the Phaiaikeans after Poseidon exacts his revenge, while the bulk of Job primarily concerns the way in which its protagonist grapples with the fate he suffers. He wishes that the day of his birth had been a day of darkness, that he might have been “as an hidden untimely birth” (3:16). He curses God as a divine trickster who “increaseth nations, and destroyeth them; he enlargeth the nations, and straiteneth them again” (12:23) or as an impersonal and destructive natural force: “The waters wear the stones: thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth; and thou destroyest the hope of man” (14:19). Whereas the gods of Greek myth are ultimately little more than selfish and conniving humans invested with immense power, the God of Job proves entirely inscrutable. His own sovereignty and transcendence is the only answer Job will receive for his complaints: “Gird up thy loins now like a man: I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?” (38:4-5).
Ultimately, the author of Job seems to take the humbler (and therefore more realistic) approach to suffering than Homer. Humans cannot know God in the way the Greeks thought they knew their pantheon. God is transcendent and not answerable to man—not because he lacks morality and justice (as the Greek gods seem to), but because his justice transcends merely human notions of it.
Yet one important thematic similarity between the two works emerges from a simple summary of the plots of the two books: both are about characters who must endure and overcome immense suffering. While it may not be the most obvious theme of Homer’s epic, The Odyssey grapples with the very same question that Job asks: why do people suffer when they do not deserve it? The first major example comes when Poseidon punishes Odysseus for blinding his son, Polyphemos. While certainly any parent will understand Poseidon’s rage at Odysseus for driving a sharpened pole into his son’s only eye, no one can deny that the Kyklops himself deserves the wound that Odysseus deals him. He has violated one of the most important moral obligations in The Odyssey: the obligation of a host to show good xenia to his guests. Not only does Polyphemos deny basic hospitality to Odysseus and his men; he violates nearly every imaginable moral obligation by eating several of Odysseus’s men. More importantly, Odysseus has little choice in the matter: he must either force the Kyklops to let him and his men go or be eaten.
Some may rightly argue that Odysseus’s pride complicates the matter of his culpability. When he sails out of Polyphemos’s reach, he shouts his name so that all will know who blinded the Kyklops. If he had remained anonymous, he would not have earned the wrath of Poseidon. But surely Poseidon’s punishment goes far beyond justice. Even if we do not forgive Odysseus his pride in taunting Polyphemos with his name, and even if we grant that Poseidon’s wrath is understandable, the justice of his actions towards Odysseus is dubious at best.
An even more striking example of the innocent suffering an unearned punishment comes in Book XIII, where Zeus allows Poseidon to punish the Phaiaikeans for showering Odysseus with gifts and giving him safe passage home. The parallels between this passage of the epic and the frame narrative of Job are quite striking. In both the Greek and the Biblical poems, we find people who are entirely blameless before men and God. The Phaiaikeans of The Odyssey practice impeccable xenia, which is one of the most important virtues and perhaps the only real moral absolute in the poem. Job, too, is virtuous and innocent of any wrongdoing. God Himself says of Job that “there is none like him on earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil” (1:8). Yet both the Phaiaikeans and Job are subjected to punishment in spite of their innocence. In the pagan story, Poseidon grudges the Phaiaikeans the assistance they provide Odysseus; in the biblical story, Satan begrudges God the righteousness of Job: “Put forth thy hand now, and touch all he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face” (1:11). Both Poseidon and Satan approach the supreme power—Zeus and God, respectively—and ask permission to inflict punishment on the righteous. Poseidon fulfills a prophesy given by Alkinoos’s father, saying that if the Phaiaikeans continue to offer xenia to every traveler who visits them, one of their mightiest ships will be turned into stone and their island will be surrounded with a mountain ring. Satan kills Job’s servants, livestock, and his children, and after that does not shake Job’s righteousness, he inflicts him “with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown” (2:7).
In both poems, the writer presents readers with people who suffer greatly for their devotion to righteousness. The fate of the Phaiaikeans (which at best means the loss of a ship and its crew) is a direct result of their devotion to perhaps the most important virtue in their ethical system: xenia. Similarly, Job’s fate results precisely from his righteousness. God allows Satan to torment and punish Job because he is blameless.
Both Homer and the author of Job acknowledge the bewildering fact that suffering often afflicts the innocent, but where the two works part ways is in the way each deals with that fact. Suffering provides the backdrop to The Odyssey, but that poem attempts no serious justification of the gods’ behavior towards men. Indeed, Homer entirely forgets the fate of the Phaiaikeans after Poseidon exacts his revenge, while the bulk of Job primarily concerns the way in which its protagonist grapples with the fate he suffers. He wishes that the day of his birth had been a day of darkness, that he might have been “as an hidden untimely birth” (3:16). He curses God as a divine trickster who “increaseth nations, and destroyeth them; he enlargeth the nations, and straiteneth them again” (12:23) or as an impersonal and destructive natural force: “The waters wear the stones: thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth; and thou destroyest the hope of man” (14:19). Whereas the gods of Greek myth are ultimately little more than selfish and conniving humans invested with immense power, the God of Job proves entirely inscrutable. His own sovereignty and transcendence is the only answer Job will receive for his complaints: “Gird up thy loins now like a man: I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?” (38:4-5).
Ultimately, the author of Job seems to take the humbler (and therefore more realistic) approach to suffering than Homer. Humans cannot know God in the way the Greeks thought they knew their pantheon. God is transcendent and not answerable to man—not because he lacks morality and justice (as the Greek gods seem to), but because his justice transcends merely human notions of it.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
The Imitation of Life
The Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese novel written by Cao Xueqin in the middle of the eighteenth century, is one of the most amazing works of literature to remain largely unknown outside the culture that produced it. It is superlative in many ways--the sheer number of characters it contains rivals that of War and Peace, but at 2500 pages the work is over twice as long as Tolstoy's great novel. It is superlative as well for the number of episodes it contains, with every chapter containing one or more episodes and these episodes often building on one another to form events and chains of events of varying complexity. Since the book contains so many characters from a huge variety of classes and backgrounds (Buddhist monks and nuns, Taoist priests, concubines of the emperor, servant girls, merchants, ne'er-do-wells, scholars, high-born girls and boys, reputable women vying with one another for power and influence, gamblers, respectable heads of household, and heads of household with secret (and not-so-secret) libidinal desires that often lead to tragedy), the book also contains an almost incalculable number of relationships of various sorts, which often comment on, refract, and reflect one another.
But if the work is concerned with individual episodes and particular characters and their relationships, it is also concerned with large, over-arching matters that include in their powerful sweep large groups of characters, sometimes the entire population of the book. For as it moves through its considerable length along its episodic path, it also describes a period of years during which the Jia family moves from a position of staggering wealth and influence through a decline in its fortunes until it disintegrates and becomes little more than a memory to give a moral point to a story about the folly of life. As such, the book begins with exuberance and promise, as the family spends lavishly to construct a magnificent garden to honor the occasion when one of their number comes back briefly to visit them after becoming one of the emperor's concubines. After she leaves, the central character--a beautiful boy named Bao-yu--takes up permanent residence in a little bungalow in the garden, where several girls in the family also come to live in their own small houses. Much of the first third of the novel or so is concerned with various preoccupations and diversions of this group of companions--from their romantic intrigues to their formation of a poetry club and various celebrations of natural events, such as autumn moon-watching parties or New Year's celebrations. The overriding tone of the novel at this point is one of optimism and confidence in the future, although as befits a work of this maturity and complexity this tone is occasionally punctuated by illness, sorrow, and even death.
Ever so slowly, the tone modulates, as the book begins to concern itself more with matters of the larger world beyond the garden walls--life in the two mansions inhabited by the family Jia and at times life even in the larger world beyond. The novel seems to contrast the sheltered, idyllic life inside the garden with the sharper, harder life outside, a life much concerned with power of all kinds--political, financial, and sexual--and the temporary satisfactions and more common sorrows that such power brings. As time moves inexorably forward, tragic elements begin to predominate, and one feels a growing constriction, not least because financial worries begin to dog the family. If as in Western literature one of the main purposes of Chinese art is to imitate life, then the novel seems by providing a plot both episodic and cumulative to indicate that life is both composed of discrete episodes and an overarching narrative that, perhaps understood only in retrospect, give those events a meaning beyond themselves. But this grand sweep, no matter how delightful individual moments may be, tends toward disintegration and loss: as one of the characters, quoting an old proverb, points out about halfway through the novel, "The times get worse but never better" (cap. 72). In this way, the plot of the immense work resembles the trajectory of the typical human life as it begins in promise and then slowly moves through greater confinement until it ends in a resignation of the freedom that in youth seemed the essence of life itself.
Another layer of challenge--among many, by the way, that one encounters in this novel--is the interpretative puzzles that it poses. Although the novel would be considered realist even by nineteenth-century European standards, it nevertheless at various times puts one in mind of the gothic, magical realism, or religious narrative. The novel begins with the tale of how the queen of heaven fashions a magical jade stone, which happens to be in Bao-yu's mouth when he is born, and very occasionally it contains tales of characters mysteriously disappearing as it were into thin air, or of the spirits of the dead speaking briefly with humans who have survived them. Such episodes are few, and they are to be sure considered remarkable and eerie, yet they never occasion deep skepticism. The result is that we seem to inhabit a world in which supernatural irruption, while rare, is entirely plausible. Indeed, in some way, the entire novel seems to be an elaboration on a very large scale of a dream that one of the characters has early in the work, which leads one to wonder whether the dream has in some way caused the action of the novel. Others have pointed out that the novel may also be a long narrative illustrating the Buddhist notion of the transience--indeed the illusory nature--of human life. And yet few other works this side of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey seem so thoroughly grounded in the magnificent sensory details of everyday life, whether in the description of a fine, well-aged tea brewed with the purest snows from a religiously significant mountaintop, a view of a fine silvery autumn moon on a clear and chilly October night, or the feel of water slipping through one's fingers while a character washes before a meal. And there are fine touches as well that perhaps mean more to those who have lived in the East, not least the occasional description of nightfall in the family compound, while the deepening darkness melds with the shadows on the ground or under the eaves and the lanterns hung from boughs and in courtyards slowly begin to glow.
On the whole, the novel is like that falling night. It moves from day to night, from joy and promise to resignation, bitterness, and loss, but like those lanterns glowing softly in the twilight, it leaves behind a memory of a rich, deeply entertaining, beguiling book that over its massive course brings to one's heart lessons great and small--about love and selfishness, about savoring the moments one is given in life, and, finally, about the transience of human existence. One owes Cao Xueqin a debt of thanks for producing such a fine book; one owes almost as much to David Hawkes, who has translated the enormous book for Penguin and thus made an otherwise inaccessible masterpiece available to English-speaking readers.
But if the work is concerned with individual episodes and particular characters and their relationships, it is also concerned with large, over-arching matters that include in their powerful sweep large groups of characters, sometimes the entire population of the book. For as it moves through its considerable length along its episodic path, it also describes a period of years during which the Jia family moves from a position of staggering wealth and influence through a decline in its fortunes until it disintegrates and becomes little more than a memory to give a moral point to a story about the folly of life. As such, the book begins with exuberance and promise, as the family spends lavishly to construct a magnificent garden to honor the occasion when one of their number comes back briefly to visit them after becoming one of the emperor's concubines. After she leaves, the central character--a beautiful boy named Bao-yu--takes up permanent residence in a little bungalow in the garden, where several girls in the family also come to live in their own small houses. Much of the first third of the novel or so is concerned with various preoccupations and diversions of this group of companions--from their romantic intrigues to their formation of a poetry club and various celebrations of natural events, such as autumn moon-watching parties or New Year's celebrations. The overriding tone of the novel at this point is one of optimism and confidence in the future, although as befits a work of this maturity and complexity this tone is occasionally punctuated by illness, sorrow, and even death.
Ever so slowly, the tone modulates, as the book begins to concern itself more with matters of the larger world beyond the garden walls--life in the two mansions inhabited by the family Jia and at times life even in the larger world beyond. The novel seems to contrast the sheltered, idyllic life inside the garden with the sharper, harder life outside, a life much concerned with power of all kinds--political, financial, and sexual--and the temporary satisfactions and more common sorrows that such power brings. As time moves inexorably forward, tragic elements begin to predominate, and one feels a growing constriction, not least because financial worries begin to dog the family. If as in Western literature one of the main purposes of Chinese art is to imitate life, then the novel seems by providing a plot both episodic and cumulative to indicate that life is both composed of discrete episodes and an overarching narrative that, perhaps understood only in retrospect, give those events a meaning beyond themselves. But this grand sweep, no matter how delightful individual moments may be, tends toward disintegration and loss: as one of the characters, quoting an old proverb, points out about halfway through the novel, "The times get worse but never better" (cap. 72). In this way, the plot of the immense work resembles the trajectory of the typical human life as it begins in promise and then slowly moves through greater confinement until it ends in a resignation of the freedom that in youth seemed the essence of life itself.
Another layer of challenge--among many, by the way, that one encounters in this novel--is the interpretative puzzles that it poses. Although the novel would be considered realist even by nineteenth-century European standards, it nevertheless at various times puts one in mind of the gothic, magical realism, or religious narrative. The novel begins with the tale of how the queen of heaven fashions a magical jade stone, which happens to be in Bao-yu's mouth when he is born, and very occasionally it contains tales of characters mysteriously disappearing as it were into thin air, or of the spirits of the dead speaking briefly with humans who have survived them. Such episodes are few, and they are to be sure considered remarkable and eerie, yet they never occasion deep skepticism. The result is that we seem to inhabit a world in which supernatural irruption, while rare, is entirely plausible. Indeed, in some way, the entire novel seems to be an elaboration on a very large scale of a dream that one of the characters has early in the work, which leads one to wonder whether the dream has in some way caused the action of the novel. Others have pointed out that the novel may also be a long narrative illustrating the Buddhist notion of the transience--indeed the illusory nature--of human life. And yet few other works this side of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey seem so thoroughly grounded in the magnificent sensory details of everyday life, whether in the description of a fine, well-aged tea brewed with the purest snows from a religiously significant mountaintop, a view of a fine silvery autumn moon on a clear and chilly October night, or the feel of water slipping through one's fingers while a character washes before a meal. And there are fine touches as well that perhaps mean more to those who have lived in the East, not least the occasional description of nightfall in the family compound, while the deepening darkness melds with the shadows on the ground or under the eaves and the lanterns hung from boughs and in courtyards slowly begin to glow.
On the whole, the novel is like that falling night. It moves from day to night, from joy and promise to resignation, bitterness, and loss, but like those lanterns glowing softly in the twilight, it leaves behind a memory of a rich, deeply entertaining, beguiling book that over its massive course brings to one's heart lessons great and small--about love and selfishness, about savoring the moments one is given in life, and, finally, about the transience of human existence. One owes Cao Xueqin a debt of thanks for producing such a fine book; one owes almost as much to David Hawkes, who has translated the enormous book for Penguin and thus made an otherwise inaccessible masterpiece available to English-speaking readers.
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