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Rereading the Stone
This chapter is in the book Rereading the Stone
Preface THIS STUDY attempts to go beyond the customary verdict on the virtue of the eighteenth-century Chinese masterpiece of prose fiction, Hongloumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber, or alternatively, Dream of Red Mansions and The Story of the Stone), as that of the most vivid and comprehensive reflection of late impe­rial culture and social institutions. Instead, Rereading the Stone argues a thesis that has hitherto received little systematic treatment: that the narrative's merit as verbal art lies in its reflexive and innovative insistence, made through myriad occasions and devices, that it is a work of fiction. The novel, in other words, is as much a story about fictive representation as it is about human life. Stated simply and directly, my thesis may be susceptible to the charge of pandering to critical notions currently fashionable in the Western academy. In my own defense, I should like to make two points clear. First, in talking this way about this particular literary text of premodern China, I am not making a general claim, as is the wont among certain literary theorists these days, that all literary texts are by definition reflexive and self-referential, that the reign­ing impulse of literature is the display of its own rhetoricity, and that in their most basic mode of existence texts cannot help miming themselves. The "prison-house of language," so goes the story, is also a hall of mirrors. This totalizing claim may or may not be true, depending on how one views the nature of language and literature, though I suspect that its uncritical acceptance may lead to a rather dull picture of the literary world and a predictable mode of criticism. Nonetheless, I do want to claim that Hongloumeng happens to be one text which places peculiar emphasis on its own nature and being and makes its own fictionality a subject of sustained exploration and dramatization. It does this by structuring literally the origin, genesis, production, and reception of the tale into the plot of the tale itself. If such an emphasis and such a tech­nique are commonplace phenomena in Western literatures (from, say, the Odyssey, through Hamlet and Don Quixote, to Ulysses and The Auroras of Autumn), they constitute a rare—perhaps even unique—achievement in the history of Chinese literature. This achievement, therefore, deserves to be studied in some detail. My second claim about what I am doing is consequent upon my first. Al­though this particular aspect of Hongloumeng was already evident to some extent to its very first readers (the Red Inkstone group of commentators), few modern students of the novel have examined the novel's achievement in this respect and its self-imposed challenge to the readers in a focused manner. The vast majority of critical studies of the work undertaken by Chinese scholars are dominated by the overriding concerns of various forms of historicism.
© 2018 Princeton University Press, Princeton

Preface THIS STUDY attempts to go beyond the customary verdict on the virtue of the eighteenth-century Chinese masterpiece of prose fiction, Hongloumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber, or alternatively, Dream of Red Mansions and The Story of the Stone), as that of the most vivid and comprehensive reflection of late impe­rial culture and social institutions. Instead, Rereading the Stone argues a thesis that has hitherto received little systematic treatment: that the narrative's merit as verbal art lies in its reflexive and innovative insistence, made through myriad occasions and devices, that it is a work of fiction. The novel, in other words, is as much a story about fictive representation as it is about human life. Stated simply and directly, my thesis may be susceptible to the charge of pandering to critical notions currently fashionable in the Western academy. In my own defense, I should like to make two points clear. First, in talking this way about this particular literary text of premodern China, I am not making a general claim, as is the wont among certain literary theorists these days, that all literary texts are by definition reflexive and self-referential, that the reign­ing impulse of literature is the display of its own rhetoricity, and that in their most basic mode of existence texts cannot help miming themselves. The "prison-house of language," so goes the story, is also a hall of mirrors. This totalizing claim may or may not be true, depending on how one views the nature of language and literature, though I suspect that its uncritical acceptance may lead to a rather dull picture of the literary world and a predictable mode of criticism. Nonetheless, I do want to claim that Hongloumeng happens to be one text which places peculiar emphasis on its own nature and being and makes its own fictionality a subject of sustained exploration and dramatization. It does this by structuring literally the origin, genesis, production, and reception of the tale into the plot of the tale itself. If such an emphasis and such a tech­nique are commonplace phenomena in Western literatures (from, say, the Odyssey, through Hamlet and Don Quixote, to Ulysses and The Auroras of Autumn), they constitute a rare—perhaps even unique—achievement in the history of Chinese literature. This achievement, therefore, deserves to be studied in some detail. My second claim about what I am doing is consequent upon my first. Al­though this particular aspect of Hongloumeng was already evident to some extent to its very first readers (the Red Inkstone group of commentators), few modern students of the novel have examined the novel's achievement in this respect and its self-imposed challenge to the readers in a focused manner. The vast majority of critical studies of the work undertaken by Chinese scholars are dominated by the overriding concerns of various forms of historicism.
© 2018 Princeton University Press, Princeton

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents vii
  3. Abbreviations ix
  4. Preface xi
  5. Chapter I. Reading 1
  6. Chapter II. Desire 53
  7. Chapter III. Stone 110
  8. Chapter IV. Literature 172
  9. Chapter V. Tragedy 219
  10. Conclusion 256
  11. Glossary 269
  12. Bibliography 277
  13. Index 313
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https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691188195-002

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents vii
  3. Abbreviations ix
  4. Preface xi
  5. Chapter I. Reading 1
  6. Chapter II. Desire 53
  7. Chapter III. Stone 110
  8. Chapter IV. Literature 172
  9. Chapter V. Tragedy 219
  10. Conclusion 256
  11. Glossary 269
  12. Bibliography 277
  13. Index 313
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