The Debt of Tears

  Bao-yu, once he had sufficiently recovered, insisted on seeing Nightingale and asking her what Dai-yu’s last words had been. Nightingale had formed a most damning opinion of him; but seeing him now so overwhelmed with grief, she softened a little towards him. Besides, Grandmother Jia and Lady Wang were there and she did not dare to be disrespectful towards him in their presence. So she gave him a full account of how her mistress had been taken ill again so suddenly, of how she had destroyed the handkerchiefs and poems, and of the few words she had uttered before her death. Bao-yu cried himself hoarse. Tan-chun now took the opportunity to mention that just before she died Dai-yu had asked for her coffin to be taken to the South. This set Grandmother Jia and Lady Wang weeping again. Luckily Xi-feng was at hand with more words of consolation, and she prevailed upon them to contain their grief. She then politely suggested that they should return to their apartments. Bao-yu could not bring himself to leave. It was only when Grandmother Jia insisted, that he tore himself away and returned to his apartment.

  Grandmother Jia, because of her age, and the state of permanent unrest that had prevailed in the household ever since the onset of Bao-yu’s illness, was beginning to show signs of strain. This latest scene of grief and lamentation affected her so deeply that she felt a feverishness and faintness coming on, and for all her concern for Bao-yu she no longer felt equal to the situation, but was forced to retire to her room and sleep. Lady Wang was if anything even more inconsolably affected, and retired likewise, giving Suncloud instructions to help Aroma in looking after Bao-yu, and adding:

  ‘If he seems to be taking it badly again, come and tell me at once.’

  Bao-chai knew how strong the attachment was that bound Bao-yu to Dai-yu, but rather than try to console him, she continued to take him to task in the same pointed manner as before. He, anxious not to cause her any offence, soon put an end to his weeping and tried to moderate his grief. He went to sleep, and the night passed uneventfully. Early next morning when they came to see how he was, he was still weak and lacking in energy, but seemed to be over the worst. They tended him with renewed care, and gradually he began to recover his strength. Fortunately, Grandmother Jia did not fall sick. It was Lady Wang on whom the shock seemed to leave the most permanent mark.

  When Aunt Xue came over to visit the convalescent, she was pleasantly surprised to find him in much better spirits. She stayed for a few days. On one of these days, Grandmother Jia made a point of inviting her over for a talk.

  ‘We owe Bao-yu’s life to you,’ she began. ‘He is out of danger now, I think. I only feel sorry for Bao-chai, after the way things have happened. Bao-yu has been convalescing for a hundred days, and is really quite fit again; and now that the mourning period for Her Grace is over, we can think of celebrating the Consummation. I should like you to choose a lucky day in the calendar for the occasion.’

  ‘Your idea is an excellent one,’ returned Aunt Xue. ‘But why should you ask me? Bao-chai may not be a very clever girl, but she has a sensible nature, and understands these things. I think you must be familiar with her disposition. If the two of them can live in harmony together, it will be such a relief for you, such a comfort to my sister, and it will set my mind at ease too. You must choose the day. Will we be inviting relatives and friends to the celebrations?’

  ‘I think we should,’ replied Grandmother Jia. ‘After all, it is the most important event in their lives. There have been so many problems and complications, but now at last they all seem to have been resolved. I think we should send out invitations and make a proper party of it. We will invite all our friends and relations. It will be a way of giving thanks, and besides, I feel that I deserve a bit of fun too, as a little reward for all the heartache this has caused me.’

  Aunt Xue was very pleased. She went on to talk of her plans for preparing Bao-chai’s trousseau. Grandmother Jia protested:

  ‘As this is all within the family, there is no need for you to go to such trouble. They already have all the furniture they need. By all means bring some of Bao-chai’s favourite things. But please don’t bother with anything else. Yes, Bao-chai is such a calm, understanding girl, not at all like my poor granddaughter, whose over-sensitive nature was the cause of her death at such a tender age.’

  Aunt Xue now began to cry too. Luckily Xi-feng came in at this moment, and inquired with a smile:

  ‘Grandmother, Auntie, what is troubling you?’

  ‘We were talking about Miss Lin,’ answered Aunt Xue. ‘It is so sad.’

  Xi-feng smiled again.

  ‘You must not allow it to upset you. Listen to this – it’s a joke I have just heard.’

  Grandmother Jia wiped away her tears, and managed a feeble smile.

  ‘Who are you going to make fun of now? Come on, we are listening. If you don’t make us laugh, we will not let you off lightly.’

  Xi-feng began gesturing with her hands, but was doubled up with laughter before she could get a word out. To learn what it was she had in mind to tell them, you must turn to the next volume.

  EXPLICIT QUARTA PARS LAPIDIS HISTORIAE

  Appendix I

  Prefaces to the first Cheng-Gao edition

  a. Preface by Cheng Weiyuan

  The novel Hong-lou meng (A Dream of Red Mansions) was originally entitled Sbi-tou ji (The Story of the Stone). There are several conflicting traditions of authorship, and we no longer know who wrote it. We only have the statement in the novel itself, that Mr Cao Xueqin worked on it and rewrote it several times.

  Curious readers used to make their own transcriptions of the book, and to buy one of these at the periodic Temple Markets could cost a small fortune. It was a true case of circulation by ‘legless locomotion’. But the copies going round are incomplete, as they all consist of eighty chapters, whereas the original table of contents gives a hundred and twenty. Even if some of them claim to be complete, on examination they turn out to have only eighty chapters – altogether a most frustrating experience for the reader!

  Surely, I thought to myself, if the table of contents lists one hundred and twenty chapters, a complete version must exist somewhere. I searched everywhere, from antiquarian book-collectors to piles of old discarded papers, leaving no stone unturned, and over a number of years I managed with difficulty to assemble twenty-odd chapters. Then one day, by a stroke of luck, I acquired ten or so more chapters from a peddler. He only agreed to sell them to me for a high price. On perusing these chapters, I discovered to my great delight that the episodes in them could more or less be dovetailed into those in the other chapters that I had previously collected. But the manuscripts were in a hopeless muddle. With the help of a friend, I carefully edited the material, removing what seemed superfluous and making good any gaps, and then transcribed the whole for publication.

  So this is the first time that Hong-lou meng has been published in its complete form. Now that it is ready, I have appended this account to inform our readers of the circumstances in which this good fortune came about. All who share my love for the book will I am sure be eager to read it without any further delay!

  Cheng Weiyuan (Little Spring)

  b. Preface by Gao E

  It is over twenty years since I first heard of Hong-lou meng and the great fascination it holds for its readers (despite the fact that there has never been a complete or definitive text). I was once lucky enough to borrow a copy from a friend. Reading it (in this incomplete state) was indeed a tantalizing experience.

  In the spring of this year, my friend Cheng Weiyuan came to see me and showed me the complete text that he had purchased. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is the fruit of my labours over several years. Bit by bit I have pieced it together, with a view to publishing it for fellow-lovers of the novel. As you are at a bit of a loose end, and in need of a restorative, will you share the labour [of preparing the manuscript for thepress] with me?’

  Although it was only a novel, the book contained nothing contrary to the tenets of Confucian teaching, and so I gladly accepted,
and fell upon the task with the eagerness of the Persian slave when he saw his pearl! Now that the work is done, I have described these circumstances for the reader’s information.

  Written in my hand this year xinbai of the reign-period Qianlong, the fifth day after the Winter Solstice (27 December 1791).

  Gao E of Tieling

  Joint Foreword to the subsequent Cheng-Gao edition

  1. Collectors have been making their own hand-written copies of the first eighty chapters of this book for nearly thirty years. We have now acquired the last forty chapters and are able to put the two together to form a complete whole. What with friends borrowing the text to make their own transcriptions, and many others eagerly competing to look at it, it was hard to find time to prepare it properly for the printer (for the first printing). In view of the great length of time needed for woodblock engraving, we decided to bring out a movable-type edition in the first instance. In our eagerness to present the book to fellow readers, we failed to be sufficiently meticulous in collating and proof-reading the first edition, and there were some serious errors contained in it. We have now reassembled the various original texts and made a detailed second recension, which has resulted in an improved text and the removal of many errors. We hope [our previous negligence] will be viewed with indulgence by our readers.

  II. Transcriptions of the first eighty chapters varied from copy to copy. We have brought together and collated a large number of these transcriptions, and have exercised our judgement and used our common sense in filling any gaps and rectifying any textual errors. Where any words have been added or subtracted, it has been done to make fluent reading, not out of any presumptuous desire to outdo the original with improvements of our own.

  III. Because the novel has been ‘unofficially’ transmitted over so many years, the copies that come onto the market and those in the possession of private collectors contain many discrepancies. For example, chapter 67 is present in some versions but missing in others. And even if its chapter-heading may be the same, its content varies. In such cases, it is impossible to set up any absolute standard of authenticity. In establishing our text, we have merely followed whatever reading seemed to make the best sense.

  IV. The last forty chapters have been acquired over a number of years, and pieced together like a fox-fur patchwork. There have been no other texts to refer to. Our sole object in making the slight modifications we have made has been to integrate earlier and later stages of the plot, and to achieve a degree of continuity and inner consistency. We have not ventured to make any arbitrary alterations, as there is still the hope that we may find a better text and be able to bring out an improved edition. We did not want to swamp the original with matter of our own.

  V. The subtlety and originality of this book have long been treasured and commented on by distinguished littérateurs. In preparing it for publication, the sheer bulk of the text itself, and the daunting volume of work involved, led us to exclude the critical comments previously transcribed with it. The reader can, after all, appreciate for himself the brilliant ironic counterpoint of the writing, the interplay between the openly stated and the hidden or implied.

  VI. In the past, when men wrote prefaces or signed their names to romances and novels, they were mostly famous writers. These few introductory words of ours, which do not constitute a formal preface, have been written because this book, after having been incomplete for so many years, has suddenly become a whole. This will be a source of great joy to others, and we are glad to let our names be known [in connection with it] and [to celebrate our] good fortune [in having helped to make] this book complete.

  VII. Our original motive for printing the book was to give fel-low-enthusiasts the opportunity to share its delights. There has subsequently been such a great demand for it from the bookshops that we have arrived at a fixed price to cover publication costs [?for a bigger ‘run’ of copies]. We do not wish to hoard this treasure!

  Little Stream (Cheng Weiyuan)

  Orchid Lodge (Gao E)

  The day after Flower Morning, the year renzi

  (4 March 1792)

  Appendix II

  The Octopartite Composition or ‘bagu wenzhang’

  The Octopartite Composition, or Eight-legged Essay, was the core of the Chinese educational curriculum and the most important subject in the official examination for nearly five hundred years. Until it was abolished in 1898, every student had to devote a disproportionate amount of energy to mastering its structure and stylistic intricacies. He would be given a Thema from either the Four Books or the Five Classics, and had to proceed from one ‘leg’ to the next of his treatment according to a definite sequence, using the appropriate formulae and rhetorical devices. There was very little room for originality of thought, and a great deal of room for the regurgitation of model essays learnt by heart from the many collections in circulation. Even today in the People’s Republic of China, the expression ‘Octopartite’ is used to refer to cliché-ridden writing, e.g. dang-bagu (Communist Party Octopartite, writing full of political jargon).

  As early as the seventeenth century, the great scholar Gu Yan-wu claimed that the use of the Octopartite in the public exams had done more harm to Chinese culture than the Burning of the Books. But there have also been those who, like Lin Dai-yu, felt that the Octopartite was not all bad. A modern scholar, for example, writing of its influence on the famous seventeenth-century critic and poet Jin Shengtan has said:

  In spite of its stifling effects on the intellectual life of China, when viewed simply as a piece of literary composition, the Octopartite has at least the two following merits to recommend it. First, it teaches the writer how to write tightly woven compositions, in which each segment contributes substantially to the whole. Second, it forces the writer to write economically by presenting his main point without bringing in any unnecessary words.1

  Zeng Pu, the late-Qing novelist, put these words into the mouth of his character Cao Yibiao in his novel Flower in a Sinful Sea (1905–6):

  It is very common nowadays to show how cultivated you are by attacking the style of writing demanded in the official exams, and by sneering at those who cultivate it as a lot of pedants. Actually, the exam style is a definite kind of prose style, and cannot be dismissed lightly. Among the works of the best writers of it you will find pieces equal to anything in classical literature, and worthy to be mentioned in their own way side by side with Tang poetry and Yuan drama.2

  I doubt if many people today would go quite so far! But it is true that with the abolition of the Octopartite, the aspiring Chinese writer, though liberated from his chains, was also deprived of the mould into which for so many centuries his predecessors had poured their attempts at self-expression. And the immediate result was a spate of formless and redundant writing. The Octopartite stifled, it stultified (when used to excess), but it also provided a mental discipline, rather like that provided by Latin Prose and Verse Composition in the West.

  At first, when translating the scenes involving Octopartite Composition (in chapters 82 and 84), I somewhat tentatively used schoolboy Latin. Then, coming across the last volume of Father Angelo Zottoli’s monumental Cursus Litteraturae Sinicae (which contains the only detailed study of the subject in any Western language),3 and seeing how effortlessly the terminology of Octopartite Rhetoric went into Latin, I began to realize that the parallel went much deeper than I had thought. For behind the recent and debased tradition of schoolboy Latin Prose Composition lies the much weightier (and more intimidating) tradition of Latin Rhetoric. And this tradition, though lost to our schools in the early nineteenth century, was kept alive by the Jesuits (like Zottoli) well into the twentieth. The extraordinary ease with which Zottoli used the language of Latin Rhetoric to translate the language of Octopartite Rhetoric emboldened me to take him as my model for the Preceptor.

  Appendix III

  The ‘Qin’ or Chinese Lute, and Knowing the Sound

  The Qin is a horizontal zither-like instrument about
three and a half feet long, with seven silken strings stretched along a curved board, often made of rare wood and elaborately inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It is the musical instrument most closely associated with the artist and poet, the scholar-gentleman. Its repertoire – exquisite, poignant, and above all suggestive – is the musical counterpart of Chinese landscape painting and lyric verse (a). To play this music, and to hear it and appreciate it properly, one must be in harmony with the Tao. For the sensitive young residents of Prospect Garden, the initiates of the Crab-flower Club, this unspoken understanding, this Knowing the Sound, represents the ideal of True Friendship and True Love.