Dream of the Red Chamber

"The acknowledgement that the text seeks to exact from its reader is...not only that fiction betokens a systematic reinforcement of illusion, but also that it focalizes, ironically, both the need and danger of that reinforcement. ... The profound paradox emerging from Cao Xueqin's masterpiece seems to be that the illusion of life, itself a painful avowal of the non-reality and untruth of reality, can only be grasped through the illusion of art, which is an affirmation of the truth of insubstantiality."

"John Minford (trans.), The Story of the Stone: The Dreamer Wakes (Volume V) (Penguin UK, 2012),"

"Ostensibly, therefore, he [Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in] has written a Taoist or Zen Buddhist comedy, showing mankind's hopeless involvement in desire and pain and the liberation of at least a few select individuals besides the hero. But only ostensibly, because the reader cannot but feel that the reality of suffering as depicted in the novel stirs far deeper layers of his being than the reality of Taoist wisdom; he cannot but respond to the author's vast sympathy for young and old, innocent and scheming, self-denying and self-indulgent. [...] In devoting his creative career to tracing the history of Pao-yü and the Chia clan, Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in is therefore the tragic artist caught between nostalgia for, and tormented determination to seek liberation from, the world of red dust."

"The variety of individual character portraits reveals a psychological depth not previously approached in Chinese literature."

"China's greatest work of literature, the 18th-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber, ... is still virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. In its native land, The Story of the Stone, as the book is also known – Stone for short – enjoys a unique status, comparable to the plays of Shakespeare. Apart from its literary merits, Chinese readers recommend it as the best starting point for any understanding of Chinese psychology, culture and society."

"John Minford (trans.), The Story of the Stone: The Debt of Tears (Volume IV) (Penguin UK, 2012),"

"The Dream of the Red Chamber is a good book and should be recommended. We don't read the Dream of the Red Chamber for its story but for the history it recorded. It's an historical novel, and the author's language is the best of all classical novels. You read Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in's vivid description of Sister Feng. Sister Feng was really well portrayed. You couldn't write so well. If you hadn't read anything from the Dream of the Red Chamber, you wouldn't know anything about feudal society."

"What Pao-yü is determined to give up is not only his sensual self but his active sympathy and compassion so that he may be released from his long obsession with suffering. The tragic dilemma posed in the drama of Pao-yü's spiritual awakening is surely this: Is insensibility the price of one's liberation? Is it better to suffer and sympathize, knowing one's complete impotence to redeem the human order, or is it better to seek personal salvation, knowing that, in achieving this, one becomes a mere stone, impervious to the cries of distress around one?"

"Written (and rewritten) by a great artist with his very lifeblood."

"In the original eighty chapters of Dream, there is no single important event. [...] All the important events happen in the last forty chapters. [...] What the first eighty chapters provide is the vivid and close texture of life."

"The most valuable treasure in Chinese literature or even Chinese culture lies in Dream of the Red Chamber."

"Dream of the Red Chamber revolutionized the novel in China, turning it away from a previous reliance on well-known myths and legends and stereotypical, idealized characters... No other Chinese novel...approaches it in depth and scope. Simultaneously a deeply personal exploration of love and passion, a family saga, and a philosophical, moral, and spiritual critique of an entire culture's values, Dream of the Red Chamber in its range, seriousness of purpose, and comprehensive vision is one of the touchstones of literary history, one of a handful of novels that radically redefined the resources and capabilities of the form."

"Chi-Chen Wang (trans.), Dream of the Red Chamber (Anchor Books, 1958),"

"David Hawkes (trans.), The Story of the Stone: The Warning Voice (Volume III) (Penguin UK, 2012),"

"One of the great monuments of the world's literature."

"It is a tale about a gifted and sensitive young man who, through contemplation of the twelve registers of the passions, represented by the twelve categories of female characters in the Registers of Beauty, and through the experience of disillusionment, attains a state of mystic contemplation and of liberating peace. The Passionate Monk, whose spiritual odyssey is sketched out in the first chapter, is Baoyu himself."

"For social realism and psychological insight, Dream of the Red Chamber is a work to be placed alongside the greatest novels in the Western tradition."

"Pao-yü]'s secret wish is not unlike that of a much-admired adolescent hero in recent American fiction: to be a catcher in the rye and rescue all lovely maidens from the brink of custom and sensuality. Pao-yü enjoys the trust and friendship of all the girls around him, therefore, not because they look upon him as a lover but because, almost alone among their menfolk, he sympathizes with their condition and shares their thoughts."

"When you first read about all these people with strange names doing curious things in an exotic setting, you get lost. Then gradually the sheer human mass of Chinese fiction, a mass whose components are all highly individuated, envelops and entrances you. You realize yourself as part of a universe of human beings endless as the dust of nebulae visible in the Mount Palomar telescope, and you are left with the significance of a human kinship powerful as flowing water and standing stone."

"The idea that the worldling's 'reality' is illusion and that life itself is a dream from which we shall eventually awake is of course a Buddhist one; but in Xueqin's hands it becomes a poetical means of demonstrating that his characters are both creatures of his imagination and at the same time the real companions of his golden youth. To that extent it can be thought of as a literary device rather than as a deeply held philosophy, though it is really both."

"The Dream of the Red Chamber provides in one volume a summation of the three-thousand-year span of Chinese literary civilization. ... As a result, the work stands in its own cultural milieu as the major works of Homer, Virgil, Murasaki, Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Goethe, and more recently Proust and Joyce, do in theirs: as an encyclopedic compendium of an entire tradition in a form that itself serves as a model against which to judge works of less imposing stature."

"Of all the classic Chinese novels, The Story of the Stone (Shitou ji) is indisputably the greatest masterpiece."

"The nostalgia for and idealization of a lost world in Stone capture the modern Chinese reader's feelings about the entire traditional Chinese culture; at the same time, its ironic, critical self-reflexivity intimates the burden of modernity."

"Scholars and readers alike have agreed that The Story of the Stone is the greatest Chinese novel, but about the nature of its greatness lively differences of opinion have swirled from its first appearance."

"I'd like to think that in another generation the heroine of "The Dream of the Red Chamber," Lin Daiyu, could be as recognizable to English-speaking readers as Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, but I'm not wildly optimistic."

"This book is believed by many to be the greatest Chinese novel ever written. For me it is like a bible for everything to do with Chinese culture. ... Books like this remind Chinese people what the true Chinese culture is all about and how to preserve it, which is why I call it the 'Bible of Chinese Culture'."

"The book transcends time and class, and has a universal value. That's one of the main features of this masterwork, and a trademark of practically all the greatest literary works in the world. Like life itself, this intricate masterpiece is remarkably rich and of great artistic appeal. The fiction is extraordinary not only for its vivid and accurate observation of life and social conflicts, but also for its epic scope, the diversity and depth of its characters and delivery, as well as its colorfulness and artistic quality."

"I was about eight or nine when I first read it – that's a very young age to be reading Dream of the Red Chamber. [...] Of course, when I first read it, with my limited understanding of the world, I treated Dream of the Red Chamber mainly as a very interesting story; just like everyone at entry level, I was focused on the romance of the two main protagonists. What's great about the book is that it can be read by the masses but it's also a great literary classic that people can spend their entire lives studying. I remember being fascinated, even at that age, by what I found to be the really beautiful poetry throughout. It's a book I've read and reread many times. It's so complex, so full of details and values that are so universal yet every time you read it, you end up with a different interpretation. How you interpret it depends on what stage you are at in life. All these years, I've been fascinated by the world described by the author, which is so completely different from mine. It's about the downfall of a family in a feudal society. It opened my eyes to a whole world I never knew existed. It's also a case study in how not to run an organisation. The family has a lot of money and a lot of guanxi, but there's a lot of mismanagement. We all have weaknesses and we all want better lives for ourselves. In this book, when people are trapped in some kind of fate, they still struggle and try their best to go against it. The characters are more three-dimensional than you'd expect – and that applies to so many of them. The book says so much about what it means to be human."

"David Hawkes (trans.), The Story of the Stone: The Golden Days (Volume I) (Penguin UK, 2012),"

"David Hawkes (trans.), The Story of the Stone: The Crab-Flower Club (Volume II) (Penguin UK, 2012),"

"Chinese architecture provides for the mass of the population low, one-story buildings. A mansion with a second story is called lou—and Hung Lou stands for "Red Two-Story Building." According to Buddhist usage, it is also a metaphor for such concepts as worldly glory, luxury, wealth, and honors—similar to the Buddhist interpretation of "red dust" as "worldly strivings," "the material world.""

"The Dream of the Red Chamber, the fascinating eighteenth-century Chinese novel...is to its native literature very much what The Brothers Karamazov is to Russian and Remembrance of Things Past is to French literature."

"This Chinese author of the eighteenth century is saying, with the same technique and with the same voice, what the great nineteenth-century Russians were to say—that the entire basis of our lives is corrupt, that life must be transformed from the bottom upward by a vast awakening of the spirit. This, though it makes his novel interesting, and an unexpected product of its time and culture, does not affect its quality as literature; what demonstrates that is its richness of invention, both of incident and of character, and the authenticity of its psychological insights, insights that, though sometimes hard to recognize in their exotic trappings, are often thrilling in their penetration. By virtue of these aspects of its content, it is beyond question one of the great novels of all literature."

"The Dream of the Red Chamber and the Japanese Tale of Genji are the two greatest works of prose fiction in all the history of literature."

"I have read Dream of the Red Chamber five times, but haven't been influenced by it because I regarded it as history. In the beginning, I read it as a story, and later as history. In reading Dream of the Red Chamber, nobody seems to have paid any attention to its fourth chapter which, in fact, is a general outline of the entire book ... with specific references being made to the four affluent families. Although Dream of the Red Chamber was written more than two hundred years ago, those who have studied it have not yet understood it, thus showing how difficult is the problem."

"In the Dream of the Red Chamber is drawn a vast panorama of Chinese family life, represented by the great house of Chia with its two main branches, their numerous offshoots, and a proliferation of kinsmen, as well as a large retinue of dependents and domestics. [...] Most graphically described in the Chinese novel are the life and activities of some thirty main characters flanked by four hundred or more minor ones who flit in and out of the novel in their secondary roles. This immense body of materials, presented in a realistic manner, provides one of the best documents for a study of the extended Chinese family: its structure, organization, and ideals such as clan solidarity and honor, respect for old age, parental authority, filial obedience, sex relationship, the position of women, the role of the concubines, maidservants, and other domestics."

"Dream of the Red Chamber...is the greatest of all Chinese novels."

"Even the finest of the modern novels cannot compare with Dream of the Red Chamber in depth and scope... To show his scorn for contemporary Chinese writing, a scholar versed in traditional literature would often ask, "What has been produced in the last fifty years that could equal Dream of the Red Chamber?" But one could turn the tables on him and ask with equal expectation of a negative answer: "What work previous to Dream could equal it?" ... Dream which embodies the supreme tragic experience in Chinese literature is also its supreme work of psychological realism."

"The Chinese The Dream of the Red Chamber may well be as great a book as the Japanese The Tale of Genji."

"It is the metaphysical modesty of Taoism that gives The Dream of the Red Chamber its style, that modesty which is the necessary ingredient of the very greatest style in any art. The most profound human relationships; the deepest psychological insights; the most intense drama; the revelation of the moral universe in trivial human action, in the simple narrative of ordinary happenings—greatness of heart, magnanimity...is the substance from which the narrative is carved."

"However great, Genji does seem a little hysterical in comparison with the vastly humane Chinese novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber."

"The Story of the Stone is an amazing achievement and the psychological insight and sophisticated humour with which it is written can often delude a reader into judging it as if it were a modern novel."

""The Dream of the Red Chamber" should be read five times before one can rightfully talk about it. It should be read five times. ... Among Chinese classical novels, "The Dream of the Red Chamber" is the best."

"A unique feature of the novel is the space given to the chambermaids. In no other novel that I know is such extended treatment given to adolescent maidservants. ... It is this rich humanity of all characters, high and low, that compels me to recognize Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in as a "great" novelist, and his work, in spite of the natural remoteness of its language and customs to the Western reader, a masterpiece to rank probably with the world's ten greatest novels."

"The Manchu epoch has left to us what is by general consent the finest novel in Chinese literature, 'Hung-lou-meng' ('The Dream of the Red Chamber'), by Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in, who died in 1763. It describes the downfall of a rich and powerful family from the highest rank of the gentry, and the decadent son's love of a young and emotional lady of the highest circles. The story is clothed in a mystical garb that does something to soften its tragic ending. Western readers appreciate this novel mainly because it is the only classical novel in which individual characters are clearly depicted, and in which emotions are openly expressed. This was and remained unusual, because to the present time, Chinese do not like to express their emotions openly. Down to the nineteenth century, the novel was from time to time forbidden, and parents were warned not to let their children read it."

"The story of Pao-yü is tested against three ideals of Chinese culture: the Confucian path of dutiful service urged upon him by his father and the Goddess of Disillusionment, the Taoist-Buddhist path of self-liberation, and the romantic path of individualist nonconformity sanctioned by the literary tradition. Pao-yü is naturally inclined to take the third path, but his spiritual nature (symbolized by his stone) complicates matters because it actively involves him in the world of suffering even while it prepares him for enlightenment. After a period of idiocy during which he is literally numbed by suffering, Pao-yü decides to follow the religious path, but, ironically, this decision also marks the tragic extinction of the most endearing component of his spiritual nature, his active sympathy and compassion."

"If life is illusory like a dream or fiction, what are we to do with so engaging an illusion as fiction? ... The trajectory of the plot, since it follows Bao-yu's quest for deliverance from his sufferings, may tempt the reader to think that the novel supplies but a mimetic enactment of the Buddhist vision. If the analysis in the present study thus far is not far off the mark, however, then I believe that the "flavor" or "secret message" of the work lies in the differentiation between the Buddhist "reading" of the world and our reading of literary fiction. ... Whereas Buddhism draws from its "reading" the conclusion that detachment is the ultimate wisdom, the experience of reading fiction, at least according to our author, is nothing if not the deepest engagement. In Hongloumeng, therefore, the medium subverts the message, the discourse its language."

"With one book, the genius of Cao Xueqin proves to have the universality of Shakespeare. Its combination of intellectual scope and immediate human drama has no counterpart in Western fiction. To appreciate its position in Chinese culture, we must imagine a work with the critical cachet of James Joyce's Ulysses and the popular appeal of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind—and twice as long as the two combined."

"Of all the world's novels perhaps only Don Quixote rivals The Story of the Stone as the embodiment of a nation's cultural identity in recent times, much as the epic once embodied cultural identity in the ancient world."

"Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (trans.), A Dream of Red Mansion, Complete and Unexpurgated (Disruptive Publishing, 2013),"