A Grand View of the Red Chamber Dream: General Introduction (Revised Edition)

When we look into the depths of this gem and see the essence of Dream of the Red Chamber, is there still a central theme that supported and assisted the author to finish the hundreds of thousands of words during his “ten years of extraordinary hard work” and walk through his“tearful and sorrowful” journey of creation? In her book A Grand View of The Red Chamber (General Introduction), Professor Li-Chuan Ou of the Department of Chinese Literature of National Taiwan University points out that the unavoidable common problems in the hundreds of years of Redology [a field of study devoted to Dream of the Red Chamber] were caused by our excess self-consciousness: “self-satisfaction projected in the vision of the general public.” Readers do have the right to speak of history, but if they uphold the understanding that “the past and the present share unequivocally the same context,” they will easily fall into the trap of “all Six Classics are my footnotes,” and reading the classics will also translate into the readers’ pursuit of self-positioning. They will adopt an attitude of “taking things for granted” about a world with which they have never been in contact, resulting in a misunderstanding of the distance created by self-awareness and the gap in time.

Therefore, the first introduction to A Grand View of The Red Chamber takes the form of a re-reading and understanding of Dream of the Red Chamber. Professor Ou returns to the times and social class of the author, and sets the tone of the book to be “remembrance and repentance.” Dream of the Red Chamber is a remembrance of the author Cao Xueqin about his past experiences, but it is also, in the moment when everything has decayed, his sadness and repentance about the glory of the past.

Dream of the Red Chamber is the narrative of a woman’s tragic destiny, but it is also Cao Xueqin’s silhouette of the fate of his family collapse. The two tragedies are combined into one, and they reinforce each other and thus form scenes of “Qinhuai and Yangzhou are old dreams, but the people remain and have long awakened from the dreams.” They are sighs and remembrancesof changes in phases, and endings. This deep pain is from the destruction of a family, but it is also from the passing of youthful years, and it can be further applied from a family to the entire world. In this repeated reasoning, it brings forth a beautiful but inevitable disillusionment of the cosmos.

The author was remembering the “past” and lamenting fate. Instead of the traditional Redology discourse that takes this as criticism of the feudal aristocracy,

Professor Ou believes that writing about aristocracy, which has been regarded as ironic and extravagant in the past, is in fact the beautiful memories that the author had used his whole life to write into the novel. The collapse of paradise in Dream of the Red Chamber was truly built on the exclusive spiritual nobility of the true aristocracy.

(Resource: LANDSCAPE January 2017)