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.