Xueqin and Xakespeare

Front matter

Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature

XUEQIN AND XAKESPEARE

READING THE STORY OF THE STONE THROUGH HAMLET

Contents

Introduction: The Story of the Stone: a ‘Shakespearean’ translation 1

1 ‘Look here upon this picture’; ‘Gag his mouth. Beat him to death’: Patriarchal authority in Hamlet and The Story of the Stone 21

2 ‘Such a perusal of my face’; “The snow-white arm’: Romantic love and tragic heroines in Hamlet and The Story of the Stone 103

Introduction

The Story of the Stone: a ‘Shakespearean’ translation

In the words of the eminent Chinese scholar C.T. Hsia, it is the ‘greater philosophical ambition’ and the ‘deeper psychological insight’ which establishes the iconic greatness of The Story of the Stone,' and it is a commonplace that Cao Xueqin is frequently coupled with William Shakespeare as the greatest creative writers in their respective cultures. Both artists create around their characters such a richness of human observation and linguistic play - literary, philosophical, historical, political, social, aesthetic — as to continue to generate an immense scholarship, and can rightly be thought of, in the famous lampooning words of the old courtier in Hamlet, as ‘the best in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited’ (H 2.2.334). It is this very ‘greatness’, however, which places such a huge demand upon translation of these texts, one ‘East’, one ‘West’, into each other’s languages, and which severely inhibits other than superficial comparison between the two writers, even when both can be ‘read’ in the same language — here, in English.

The title of this book — Shakespeare written as Xakespeare and Xueqin written without the proper name ‘Cao’ — brings East and West together and signals an ambition to unfold the Chinese literary masterpiece, translated into English as The Story of the Stone, from the perspective of a reader of Shakespearean drama, Hamlet in particular. For the English-language scholar lacking Chinese literacy, this ambition has been made both viable and encouraged by the superlative translation of the five-volume novel, the first three volumes by David Hawkes (1973, 1977, 1980) and the last two volumes — written by Gao E based on text by Cao Xueqin — by John Minford (1982, 1986). While there have been many more or less substantial previous English translations, it is a most fortunate mediation of the cultural barrier for this reading of “Xueqin through Xakespeare’ that the Hawkes/Minford translation finds in the Chinese literary text so many resonances with Shakespeare’s use of words and dramatic art: the translation is itself the initial act of interpretation upon which this ‘reading’ relies for

DOI: 10.4324/9781032635552-1 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

its own justification. Further, a recent scholarly study of the David Hawkes translation, tracing within it the influence of the multi-lingual translator’s global literary heritage — West and East — goes so far as conclude that ‘In his translation of Stone, Hawkes may be said to have rendered la langue de Confucius into la langue de Shakespeare’.’ If this is an act of cultural appropriation, it is also a reverse invitation to translate the language of Shakespeare in Hamlet into the language of Confucius.

The title of the book is also a simple illustration of one of the lighter confusions and complexities of reading in translation: names themselves both reflect and resist the linguistic approximations involved in interpretation across cultures. The Chinese pinyin romanisation Cao Xueqin — or Cao Zhan, the literary name for Xueqin — has replaced earlier Western romanisations Ts’ao Chan and Tsao Hsueh-chin, with the unfortunate implication that for most English-speaking readers, ‘Cao’ would most commonly be pronounced ‘Cow’, verified by this reader obliged to suffer a national radio book club broadcast on The Story of the Stone in which the author was referred to as ‘Mr Cow’ throughout. This is not a trivial matter: Hawkes saw pronunciation as a ‘main consideration . . . He did not want the Pao in Pao-yu or Pao-chai to be pronounced Pow’, hence his insistence on ‘Bao’. The use of the author’s personal name Xueqin rather than Cao in the title and throughout the book reflects this ‘consideration’, played with by the author himself in a comical moment in the narrative when the family matriarch confuses the name ‘Bao’ with ‘Zhao’ and is annoyed at being corrected: ‘Well, ‘Zhao’ or ‘Bao’ or ‘brown cow’, how can I be expected to remember such things?’ (S2.47.435)

Scholars of imaginative literature, negotiating the archaeological chasm between past and present, classical and modern, within and between cultures, are simultaneously persuaded by the imaginative power of great art to breach this chasm and ‘speak’ as if directly to the human heart and mind. In particular, it is the ‘speaking’ dramatic qualities — visual, aural, performative - of Xueqin’s narrative style brought out in the Hawkes translation which invite comparison with Shakespeare’s poetic drama. Hawkes himself may have been encouraged in this by an aspect of the literary origins of The Story of the Stone to which he draws attention in his Introduction to the novel:

At one point, so Red Inkstone [one of Xueqin’s contemporary commentators] tells us, he even thought of abandoning the traditional [prose] romance form altogether and writing a verse drama instead. Certainly he was influenced much more by the techniques of drama (which he loved) and painting (which he practised) than by any of the pre-existing works of Chinese prose fiction, which on the whole he rather despised.

Again, C. T. Hsia, taking Shakespeare as an example, declares that in reading the great verse dramatists such as Tang Xianzu, ‘we must attend to every detail of the dramatic structure, every nuance of poetic language, to do proper justice to the meaning of the plays’.* This emphasis on textual analysis has been equally applied to Cao Xueqin; ‘the ideal reader of The Story of the Stone realises that every phrase in the text should be read as if it were a line of poetry’, moreover, of poetry of the late Tang, with its ‘reduced horizons of hope’.*

For the English-language-only reader, this places an enormous dependence on the translation, perhaps relieved a little by recalling that at the outset of the novel, Brother Stone/Xueqin specifically distances himself from conventional historical romances, ‘boudoir’ romances and ‘the kind of romance . . . that only gets written because the author requires a framework in which to show off his love poems’; by contrast, his extended narrative is a less-rarefied, more homely read, a tale such as one may pick up

When they are recovering from sleep or drunkenness, or when they wish to escape from business worries or a fit of the dumps, and in doing so may find not only mental refreshment but even perhaps, if they will heed its lesson and abandon their vain and frivolous pursuits, some small arrest in the deterioration of their vital forces.

(1.1.50)

Brother Stone’s Taoist interrogator is not satisfied with this and makes ‘a careful second reading’: now ‘He could see that the main theme was love... quite simply a true record of real events . . . entirely free of any tendency to deprave or corrupt’ 1.1.52. But the disingenuous tone remains — ‘quite simply’, ‘entirely free’: can ‘a true record’ be impeccably moral, both mimetic and homiletic? Such a ‘reading’ leaves open the whole question of just what ‘kind of romance’ is replacing the old-style erotic scenes and showy poetic offerings by which earlier writers sought to persuade their readers of their emotional and moral truths. Perhaps enlightenment may be found in the remark of a translator of the writings of Zhuang-zi of ‘butterfly’ fame that, although he and his fellow philosophers used the same Chinese word for ‘the Way’, they all meant something different by it. How significant these differences may have been is not indicated, but an example of how profound this could be is given in an English translation of a German translation of Xueqin’s text, where the ‘Western point of view’ of the novel is summed up as the case history of a highly-gifted but degenerate young aristocrat, a psychopath and a weakling, asocial, effeminate, plagued by inferiority complexes and manic depressions who, although capable of a temporary rallying of energies, founders among the demands of reality and slinks cravenly from human society.’

While ‘Making sense of Bao-yw’ is part of a chapter-heading in a current teaching compendium on the novel’ — Bao-yu being ‘strange boy’ even to his doting grandmother and as much ‘a case’ as his beloved Dai-yu, each attracting pathological analysis by scholars — from the outset the Hawkes translation goes out of its way to garner sympathy for the hero’s ‘strange’ temperament, his insistence on acting as he feels and thinks rather than as convention dictates. This point is now elaborated as an essential underlier to the two universal literary themes chosen here for comparative analysis: patriarchy and romantic love.

In Chapter Five, Xueqin envelops the reader in an entrancing operatic Dream foretelling in cryptic song, verse and image, the fates of twelve female characters, tragic in love for all but the one ‘survivor’ who narrowly escapes into a happy future scarcely begun by the novel’s end. A song-cycle is performed, titled A Dream of Golden Days, evoking an aesthetic illusion of ethereal yet sensuous beauty but deeply ironic in its libretto eloquent of the woe that is love - and marriage. The elegiac expression of suffering throughout is uniquely personal in the First Song, The Mistaken Marriage:

Let others all Commend the marriage rites of gold and jade; I still recall The bond of old by stone and flower made; And while my vacant eyes behold Crystalline snows of beauty pure and cold, From my mind Can not be banished That fairy-wood forlorn that from the world has vanished. How true I find That every good some imperfection holds!

Even a wife so courteous and kind No comfort brings to my afflicted mind. (1.5.140)

While the reader understands that these words anticipate those of the hero Bao-yu, at the end of the ‘Gao F’ volume four ‘mistakenly’ married to ‘gold’ not to ‘flower’ through an ‘ingenious plan of deception’ (4.96.322), the Song’s expression of empathy with the grieving lover has the force of the writer’s own feelings on the marriage as ineradicably tragic. ‘Others all’ commend the marriage of ‘gold and jade’ and the mourner knows that rationally, he should be comforted by a wife ’so courteous and kind’, but even her purity and goodness leave his senses ‘vacant’ and his mind remains filled with longing for the ‘bond of old’ and the ‘vanished’ beloved: the Song is a solemn and dignified lament for love ‘vanished’ from the world, beyond the ‘comfort’ offered by this world — or the next, as narrated in the terrifying punitive dream in Chapter 116. At this early stage in the novel, framed as it is by a Buddhist myth as a story of the foolishness of romantic love — the ‘great illusion of human life’ — and narrated as a family saga conducted within Confucian orthodoxies driving ‘others all’ against romantic love — the ostensible yet perverse ‘lesson’ of the entire Dream experience — the hero’s cri de coeur makes a claim on romantic love in the tradition of the great romantic opera-dramas of the past, now under disfavour by the increasing conservatism of the Qing emperors.

It is instructive, then, that the Hawkes translation has chosen the opening lines of the Song to echo the opening lines of Shakespeare’s famous ‘marriage’ Sonnet 116, which begins with ‘Let’ as do three others in the collection of 152 sonnets’? known as ‘the greatest love poem in the language’: it is still today read aloud at weddings:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments; love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the end of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. (William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, p. 144)

The Shakespeare sonnet celebrates marriage as the union of ‘true minds’, a love which will remain steadfast through all of life’s challenges, ‘even to the edge of doom’. That Hawkes finds a resonance in these lines with Kueqin’s Song mourning marriage as a union which is loveless, highlights the paradoxical way the Song makes a claim on love as an experience enduring for ever, even if, denied by the ‘alteration’ of the ‘mistaken’ marriage, it endures as an experience of eternal suffering. It seems possible that Hawkes wished not to lose this depth of feeling in the Song to the comforts of homily one of the earlier translations tries to find:

Alas! now only have I come to find that human happiness is incomplete; and that a couple may be bound by the ties of wedlock for life, but that after all their hearts are not easy to lull into contentment.'°

Hawkes’ translation keeps open the ‘the gap between experience and inherited constructs of experience’ which is the defining characteristic of Shakespearean literary ‘modernity’,!' activating the paradox of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ the novel has established as its terms of engagement with literary illusion and ‘true-life’ in the opening chapter:

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true; Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real. (1.1.55)

The more ‘real’ and ‘present’ the fictional illusion of the hero’s longing for lost love, the wider the gap between the truth of this love and the untruth of the marriage commended by ‘others all’. ‘Stay, illusion’, Hamlet orders the Ghost, activating the tragedy, the fatal struggle to keep the illusion from vanishing; Bao-yu’s romantic illusion ‘stays’ and cannot be banished, even as the sufferer vanishes from the world into silence, leaving his story ‘penned with hot and bitter tears’; Xueqin as with ‘Xakespeare’ at the close of Hamlet drawing his breath ‘in pain/to tell my story’.

Why drama? Why Hamlet?

A prose narrative often described as ‘the epitome of the great tradition of Chinese family fiction’, comparison of The Story of the Stone with European prose fiction tends to come first to mind. Scholars bring to bear ‘Balzac’s panoramic view of society, the satire of arrogance and fashion of [Thackeray’s] Vanity Fair, the funny, meandering mischief of Decameron’, although ‘these comparisons are inadequate to a work [The Story of the Stone] so monumental and so vehemently itself’. Another, even at the risk being ‘incongruous’, thinks in terms of sheer ‘numbers of characters’, with Proust’s [Remembrance of Things Past] more than three hundred, and Powell [Dance to the Music of Time] some four hundred: ‘the only work to bear artistic comparison with them, Cao Xueqin’s great Dream of the Red Chamber approaches five hundred’, exhibiting ‘enormously superior . . . powers of female characterisation’.'’ Or, if the focus narrows, comparison may be made with the late eighteenth-/nineteenth-century English novel of manners, described by one literary historian as the ‘amount of detail it habitually accords both to the individualisation of its characters and to the detailed presentation of their environment’.

While The Story of the Stone fulfils this latter description, it is the tragic dimension of Cao Xueqin’s vision of his ‘characters and environment’ which brings the novel much closer to William Shakespeare than to Jane Austen. Ostensibly bearing out the Buddhist view of ‘the great illusion of human life’ and the delusion of romantic love, in the process of excavating this ancient wisdom the narrative shifts the focus from the mantra of the futility of the passions to a claim for the existentially human, ‘noble’ concept of love in all its forms’ — empathy, understanding, affection, the special affinity of romantic love, familial love, friendship ‘even’ (S 4.98.37) — and the tragic contradictions in life as it is lived in ‘the world of red dust’, which distort and destroy its expression and value. The love story becomes a test of many aspects of the immensely refined, richly literary, aesthetic and deeply conflicted culture brought into vivid life in the novel, valuing personal self-cultivation but distrustful of personal emotion, espousing chastity and marital harmony but rife with marital unhappiness; loving to children but sacrificing them to loveless marriages based on family allegiances often degraded by dubious forms of monetary exchange; espousing Confucian values of self-cultivation, familial harmony, civic virtue and social responsibility but only exposing the human cruelty this inflicts when these Confucian duties are flouted or ignored. When the love relationship ends in the death of the heroine, and the hero out of love for his mother and grandmother sits for the civil examinations to bring honour to the family and then vanishes, reportedly becoming a monk, the imaginative vitality which has sustained the novel for so long simply drains away. Xueqin has forewarned this: the ending of the love story is like the story of the deaf rocket-man told half-way through the novel: not hearing the explosion, he complained that the rocket strapped on his back had been made so badly that ‘all the gun-powder had trickled away before they’d had a chance to set it off’ (S, 3.54.41).

In considering which of Shakespeare’s many plays offer the most potential to match the ‘philosophical ambition’ and ‘deeper psychological truth’ of The Story of the Stone, while readers and scholars may differ about just what this ‘ambition’ and ‘truth’ may be, at the most evident this would give prominence to ‘philosophical ambition’ about Confucian patriarchal order and ‘psychological truth’ about romantic love. On this basis, although several other Shakespeare plays also come to mind - Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming the Shrew — Hamlet alone has been chosen, not to further overburden an exercise already claiming so very many literary points of primary and secondary reference and, most particularly, to allow for the detailed analysis of key scenes and speeches invited by the Hawkes/Minford translation’s emphasis on visual spectacle and dramatic enactment.

The Story of the Stone projects a vision of a generations-old ancestral family in all its revered cultural magnificence now hollowed-out, not renewed, by a generation which has lost its noble ancestral vigour and worldly competence, hiding its moral degradation and no longer able to ‘tell which people are better than others’ (1.3.104). These are the enraged, ambiguous words of the boy-hero Bao-yu on his first appearance; words which, in the Confucian hierarchical social order of the ‘five relationships’, have the philosophical and psychological significance, if not the quotable elegance, of the existential questioning of Hamlet’s speech beginning ‘To be, or not to be’ (3.1.55). This is to claim for The Story of the Stone not a loss of ‘coherent vision’ in its ‘polyvalent richness’! but an imaginative superabundance, a complex modernity of vision similar to that which sustains the unending fascination of Hamlet on the stage and in the study. Nor, much though it has in common with the genre of Western allegorical literature, does the novel ‘read’ — at least not in the Hawkes/Minford translation -— as an allegorical work achieving a vision of ‘potentially dramatic or even dialectical choices . . . as complementary alternatives within a single, intelligible ground of being’. Rather, The Story of the Stone reads, as does Hamlet, as inhabiting a ‘condition of interpretative uncertainty’'® rather than complementarity; it reflects “competing constructions of human reality and truth — competing expressions of desire’’’ referenced through an immense literary repository of received wisdom and poetic imagination and refracted through the precocious consciousness of the young hero - and heroine(s) — and the ineluctable virtue of their tragic love.

The literary convention of the tragic hero

It is an insistence on ‘that within’, beyond words, ‘either you know what it means or you don’t’ — an intensely individual investment in the human spirit in the creative imagination of Cao Xueqin and Shakespeare beyond the prevailing orthodoxies - which generates a shared tragic dimension around the heroes. Scholars write of Greek tragic drama that “Tragedy presents a conflictually constituted world defined by ambiguity, uncertainty, and unknowability . . . the experience of transcendental opacity’”® and of Shakespearean tragedy as ‘a collision of deeply held and irreconcilable principles, embodied in characters who are destroyed when these visions collide’.2! The Chinese classical literary tradition of tragic romantic drama which Cao Xueqin inherits and reinterprets may be described in similar terms; ‘scholar/beauty’ tragic characters fatally trapped in a world which has sacrificed romantic love — ‘either you know what it means or you don’t’ — to social order, a seemingly self-evidently ‘rational’ choice but at the price of its meaning at the ‘deepest stratum’ of human experience (a detailed examination of this tradition and its reinterpretation in The Story of the Stone is in preparation as a separate monograph). Further, central to the depth of feeling and thought in both Hamlet and The Story of the Stone is that the tragic heroes, in their intuitive investment in their sense of what is right, are not only victims of opposing systems of belief but also of their own human fallibility, their unwitting destructive blindness in this pursuit, such that it is in their tragic failure of themselves where each ‘story’ ends: it is ‘the ironic perversion of purposive action that defines the essence of tragedy’. In this sense, a second chance is offered by the works of art themselves, to redeem their ‘wounded names’.

An intriguing comment on the heroic tradition universal in literature is that, in the history of their public reception, there is a similar underlying unease with how, in Hamlet and Bao-yu, Shakespeare and Xueqin present a hero who in significant respects offends conventional ideals of heroic masculinity; Hamlet for his ‘sheathing his sword’ and his misogynous attack upon Ophelia, and Bao-yu for his irresponsibility as heir-apparent, gender eccentricities and improprieties. Since the generation after Shakespeare there has been a continuous tradition of casting a female — often a famous actor — to perform the role of Hamlet, not to give an ambiguous sexual dimension to the character but to distance the play from the underlying discomfort of Western culture with a hero who, while indubitably compelling as a dramatic expression of the struggle to live his authentic self, can be felt to be disappointingly unheroic in his role as avenger, not least in how he over-acts the antic role of being ‘mad for love’ with unforeseen tragic consequences. Xueqin’s presentation of Bao-yu as ’a strange boy’ in his empathy with female culture and his revulsion against the patriarchal male literati stereotype is often made fun of by his educated and cultivated girl cousins and subjected to his creator’s gentle irony. While readers in Xueqin’s own time, familiar with the literary genre of ging — sentiment and the authentic self - may have sympathised with the hero’s alienation from the prevailing rigidities of patriarchal order, later sequels and commentaries on The Story of the Stone show, in the words of a modern scholar, that ‘many readers felt uneasy about [Bao-yu’s] more self-indulgent and decadent aspects, felt that the young man needed to be more serious, more studious, and, well, just more conventional’. In the further consideration of this aspect given in the following two chapters, it is suggested that as a living presence in the novel, the visionary hero Bao-yu, like Hamlet, is at his most discomforting in his misplaced expression of male omniscience in love; this is when he places a blind faith in ‘destiny’, an act of hubris which sacrifices the object of his love to the real ‘unreal’ world of ‘real events’, action, inaction and consequence.

Mystifications of texts and ‘words’

For neither Hamlet nor The Story of the Stone is there is an authoritative version, exponentially increasing the pitfalls of translation in comparative analysis. Two ‘quarto’ versions of Hamlet were published in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and a further version posthumously in the first collected works of Shakespeare in 1623, all with significant differences. The first 80 chapters of The Story of the Stone circulated within the author’s family and then more widely following the author’s death in 1763 prior to its completion, accumulating extensive annotation and additional chapters to provide a more satisfactory ending than the original narrative popularly felt to be disappointingly inconclusive. When the 120-chapter version with an additional 40 chapters edited by Gao E and Cheng Waiyuan was printed in 1792, the editors told their readers that the author’s name was unknown”: the ‘discovery’ of the author gave rise to the bias of the ‘author-centred school’ of interpretation.”

Details of how the different versions of each work have been ‘cobbled together” are given in notes in the editions used in this discussion — the Arden Hamlet, the Penguin Classics The Story of the Stone — and will be glanced at only occasionally, except in relation to one striking point of similarity between novel and play: how the lack of a definitive text is linked to a major shift in each author’s apparent intentions in his writing and in how he wanted to end his masterpiece. That is, while the first three acts seem to be leading to a feat of ‘cunning’ victorious theatricality by the ‘more complicated’, deeply alienated, behind-the-scenes all-controlling Hamlet, reprising its Nordic source,” the play makes an unexpected turn when the hero gives himself over to the mercy of Providence, the ending ‘wrested’ from its generic model by Shakespeare, ‘the better’ to expose the ‘invisible rot’ of contemporary historical reality — and he did so ‘unflinchingly’.”® Similarly, for many readers, the ending of The Story of the Stone is not where they had expected the first three volumes to be leading. Without wishing here to elaborate on all the very different circumstances, there is a moment halfway - earlier referred to — where an authorial question is hovering: how will this ‘true-life’ love story end, so unlike the cliché romances in its chaste observance of the proprieties but, as ‘who will marry who’ closes in, exposed ‘unflinchingly’ to ‘harsh’ reality? ‘Our tale puts forth two tails. Which tail to wag? Wig-wag’. (S, 3.54.32)

The written word itself, the entire literary heritage, is specified as problematic by both Shakespeare and Xueqin: to read, or not to read? Which books are ‘better’ than others? Although the first question Bao-yu asks in the novel is, ‘Do you study books yet, cousin?’, when his own literary reference is queried, he professes scorn at taking books as ‘true’: ‘There are lots of made-up things in books’ — if graciously making an exception of ‘the Four Books of course’ (1.3.103); Hamlet, the Wittenberg scholar, in the first flush of his mission to ‘right’ the world, imagines himself wiping away all his ‘books’, his learning, all his ‘fond’ memories, no ‘book’ left remaining in his ‘brain’ except the ‘word’ of the Ghost — ‘remember me’ (1.5.110).

Each writer mystifies interpretation from the outset.

Gentle reader,

What, may you ask, was the origin of this book?

Though the answer to this question may border on the absurd, reflection will show that there is a good deal more in it than meets the eye.

(1.1 47)

These are the opening lines of The Story of the Stone. The ‘absurdity’ is in its origins as a story magically self-inscribed on a mythological stone block found unfit to rebuild the heavens. The stone imagines itself transformed into a ‘foolish mortal man’ whose youthful ‘ups and downs’ of fortune in the earthly realm are recorded ‘exactly as they happened’ (S, 1.1 50) and, duly edited, become the book here seeking the gentle reader’s reflections upon it. The magic stone’s ambition to record in words the direct experience of mortal existence is an ‘absurdity’ in a further sense: Xueqin, himself, cannot be certain that the human heart and mind will always be receptive to what his words are saying:

Pages full of idle words

Penned with hot and bitter tears:

All men call the author fool:

None his secret message hears. (S, 1.1.51)

Shakespeare may share this fear. The opening lines of the Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark demand:

Who’s there?

Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold thyself. (H, 1.1.2)

‘Who’s there?’ is a question asked of the hero throughout the play, and by the hero of himself. Later in the first Act it is demanded of a Ghost, a mysterious presence in the play and, as is the magic Stone, made visible — firstly as the warrior patriarch and later as an old man in a nightgown - about which there is also ‘a good deal more than meets the eye’. At the very end, interpretation remains ‘unsatisfied’:

O God, Horatio, what a wounded name Things standing thus unknown, shall I leave behind me!

The very act of unfolding the mystery of Hamlet is in itself on every new ‘reading’ always so absorbing a challenge that reading The Story of Stone through reading Hamlet seems more perhaps to vastly complicate an unfolding of the Chinese novel — even in a translation inflected with Shakespearean utterance — than to be of mutual benefit. In both these literary works it is the drama of the creative imagination reinvesting with a new naturalism the inherited models of the fictional genre they inhabit; in the event, the challenge has also found to be the reward: what began as a reading of Xueqin through Shakespeare became just as much a reading of Shakespeare through Xueqin.

In this reading, Hamlet and The Story of the Stone have in common an exploration of the ‘feeling/thinking’ hero, one whose intuitive self — ‘that within’ (1.2.85), ‘I know it can’t be any good’ (1.3.104) — sets him apart from the prevailing cultural codes and power structures and, in the combat of values which ensues, reveal in themselves and their worlds such contradictions as they cannot overcome. Both heroes, fully imagined literary protagonists if in many respects quite unlike, Jia Bao-yu and Prince Hamlet take refuge in madness to remove themselves from ‘this harsh world’ — in the wisdom of the Analects 5.21, ‘playing the fool to survive bad times’ — only for this, ironically, to provide justification for entrapment. There is throughout these famous literary works a deliberate obduracy of definitive meaning: the question ‘Who’s there?’ which opens Hamlet echoes through to the end; the aura of mystery around his jade talisman birth legacy, through to his final disappearance, haunts the hero’s identity in The Story of the Stone. And for all that Hamlet may finally ‘let be’ and place himself at the mercy of the Christian belief in ‘a special providence in the fall of a sparrow’ (5.2.198), and for all that Bao-yu will know soon enough, ‘My time has time come!’ (4.82.65) to take the Buddhist ‘path to Higher Ground’, in neither literary work is there any creative endeavour to give imaginative conviction to such wished-for future states; authorial ambivalence and even gentle mockery suggest that Xueqin may even have been influenced by the tradition of scepticism in Chinese philosophy.”’