Self-expression

The novel as dialogue

The reader of a novel sometimes finds himself in a situation resembling that of a therapist in a psychotherapeutic session. In a wide sense, both are interpreters of (spoken or written) texts. And while the author of a novel is undoubtedly more in control of his own text than a patient on the bench, great novels are usually complex enough to contain not only cracks, contradictions and inconcistencies producing ruptures in the surface meaning of the text, but also hidden patterns, regularities and recurrent themes of which the author himself may have been only semi-conscious or even completely unaware. Like recurrent patterns in the free associations of a patient in therapy, such underlying structures sometimes reveal deeper psychological issues running through the entire novel, what I will call psychological structures.

In this book, I will try to identify and analyse some of the psychological structures that permeate the great 18th-century novel The Red Chamber Dream �t�lj� by Cáo Xu��qín ��ѩ��. The comparison with psychotherapy is only meant to indicate an interest in the psychological issues emanating from the text, without thereby attempting to pathologise either the novel or its author. It goes without saying that The Red Chamber Dream is not just some kind of transcript from a therapy session, and that the issues I discuss here are not the entire truth about the novel. They are, however, parts of that truth, and I do think these parts are in need of more attention than they have been so far accorded.

This first chapter argues that the self-expression of The Red Chamber Dream is an immanent feature of the text itself and that the little snippets of information that we happen to have about the actual author's life and death are of limited relevance.

Memories and fantasies

Traditionally, Chinese literary critics have tended to link self-expression to autobiography, and many 19^th-century critics of The Red Chamber Dream assumed without question that the novel contained autobiographical material.[1] With the rise of textual criticism in the 1920s, Hú Shì ���m (19??) and Yú Píngbó ��ƽ�� (19??) began to collect external evidence for correspondences between the events and characters of the novel and the facts of the author's life and death, initiating what is still a major trend among Chinese scholars studying the novel, though no longer the only one. Hú Shì (19??:??) concluded:

The Red Chamber Dream is a concealed autobiography. Zh��n B��oyù and Ji�� B��oyù are embodiments of Cáo Xu��qín, and the Zh��n and Ji�� families are reflections of the original Cáo family.

���t�lj�����һ���[ȥ���µ��Ԕ����e����硢�Z�Ɍ��񣬼��Dz�ѩ���Լ��Ļ��������Z�ɸ����Ǯ��ղܼҵ�Ӱ�ӡ�

The immense interest in the autobiographical aspects of The Red Chamber Dream has placed the focus of research firmly outside the novelistic text, on the author and the immediate historical background of the novel. I shall argue, however, that nine decades of scholarship inspired by Hú Shì and Yú Píngbó have vastly exaggerated the presence of such autobiographical elements, and that the self-expressive elements of The Red Chamber Dream are not primarily based on autobiography and memories, but derive their emotional force just as much from fictional imagination and fantasies.

Apart from some initial insights concerning the personal and familial relations forming the immediate backdrop to the writing of The Red Chamber Dream, as well as the different authorship of the first 80 and the last 40 chapters, the research into the author's biography has brought us little information of relevance for our interpretation of the novel. By exaggerating the importance of the novel's autobiographical elements, it has distorted our view of the text and sometimes led to a disregard for connections within the text that cannot be traced to the author's life. In the chapter 2 of this book, for instance, I will highlight a contrast between characters who are killed by their genuine feelings of love and loveless lechers who survive unscathed, but since this contrast hardly has any basis in the author's biography, it has been largely overlooked in the scholarly literature.

I am not denying the presence of autobiographical elements in the novel, but the amount and significance of these elements have been drastically overstated. This is best illustrated by a look at what is perhaps the single most important piece of external evidence for the autobiographical hypothesis, the Zh��yànzh��i ֬���S commentaries, produced by close friends or relatives of the author while the novel was still being written. These sometimes relate details of the text to moving memories of a past that the commentators had obviously shared with the author, as when one of them comments on a golden figure of the God of Literature given by Grandmother Ji�� �Zĸ as a gift to Qín Zh��ng ���:

Does the author still remember that thing about the God of Literature in solid gold? Reflecting on the past in light of the present, my heart is broken!

���߽���ӛ�����֮�º������˼�����c���Ĵݡ�

            (chapter 8, 1754 edition)

Quite a few of these comments relate not only to tiny details like this little gift, but to major themes surrounding the disastrous fall of the Ji�� family, which obviously reflects the tragic life experience of both the author and the commentators, who may have grown up together in an immensely rich and powerful family that was torn apart and scattered as all their property was confiscated by imperial mandate in 1728, when the author may have been just 13 years old. Such themes dominate the entire novel, and are frequently related by the early commentators to their shared memories. For instance, when the novel tells us how "??" �Ҹ��ˌ����K�Ђ�������ɢ�����v (chapter 5), one of the commentators writes:

            ??

�^���˶ôˣ�������•һ�ޡ�

(chapter 5, Youzheng) [2]

The commentators sometimes suspect that the author would not have been able to write the way he does without the memories they share with him:

            ??

�ǽ��v�^����Ό��ó���

(chapter 18, 1760 edition)

And at least one commentator suspects that readers without this special access to a shared past will find parts of the novel boring:

            ??

���v�^�߄tϲ�䌑�棬δ���߿ֲ����ӷ���

            (chapter 8, 1754 edition)

In such comments, the early commentators see the author and themselves as lost souls huddling together after the disaster, with the novel as their shared memorial of a lost past.

In fact, however, only a tiny minority of the comments in the early manuscripts are written in this personal style. The vast majority of them are of the same kind as later comments written by readers who had never met the author and were even left to make largely ill-founded guesses about his identity. They contain most often laudatory comments on the style and structure of given passages, philosophical reflections on the relation between the events in the novel and life in general, advice to the reader about how to understand the text, explanatory and comparative material, etc.[3] In most cases, they do not attempt to relate the events in the novel to specific events of the author's (or anybody else's) life.

Thus, in spite of their special access to a past that obviously played some role in the writing of the novel, the early commentators generally treat the novel as a piece of fiction and its characters as fictional figures who are made to live on paper because of a gifted author and not because they once lived in the real world.

The early commentaries' frequent use of laudatory exclamations such as "like seeing the person, like hearing his voice" ��Ҋ���룬��„��•, which are sometimes taken to indicate that characters in the novel are based on real-life models, are in fact conventional ways of praising the mimetic realism of the novel's character descriptions. Such expressions were also used by 19th-century commentators, who knew nothing about the author's life.

In line with Hú Shì's assertion that Zh��n B��oyù and Ji�� B��oyù are representations of the author himself, many scholars have attempted to determine who specific characters in the novel "actually" are, i.e., on which real-life models they have been based.[4] In fact, however, the early commentaries never see any of the novel's characters as representing specific real-life persons. On the contrary, they clearly see even the main protagonist Ji�� B��oyù as belonging to the realm of fiction:

The way this book writes about B��oyù, his character is that of a person whom we only get to know when we meet him in this book, not somebody we might ever have really seen with our own eyes.

�˕��Ќ�һ�����䌚��֮���ˣ�����݅축���Ҋ��֪�д��ˣ���δĿ���H���ߡ�[5]

His behaviour does not reflect the behaviour of anybody the author or the commentator has known. When he wants to eat the rouge on the maidservant Yu��ny��ng's lips, the commentator writes:

Is that a way to eat rouge? Reader, have you ever seen anything like this?

��֬���@�ӳԷ������ٰ����ɣ����^��[6]

Even as a fictional character B��oyù appears to be quite unique, and the commentators revel in the originality of the author's imagination:

Not only have we never met such a person in the real world, we have not even seen descriptions like these in any novels or romances, old or new, that we might have read.

�����������HҊ�@�ӵ��˲�������醽������֮С�f�����У���δҊ�@�ӵ����֡�[7]

In a few instances, the early commentators do discuss the relation between characters in the novel and real persons. Even then, however, they make it entirely clear that they do not see a stable link between a character and a real-life person. For instance, when B��oyù tries to run out of the garden with his entire retinue of servants in order to avoid his father in chapter 17, one comment reads:

The first time I read this, I couldn't help feeling angry, because I thought the author was describing things from my childhood, but thinking it over, he might also be painting a portrait of himself, not only me.

�����֮�����Xŭ�飬�w�^�����������������£��򣨻أ�˼�����Ԍ����գ��Ϊ����ա�

While this comment may support the view that some events of the novel may be based on real-life events, it hardly supports the attempt at finding specific and consistent real-life models for the novel's characters.

It is quite common to misread some comments as indicating that characters in the novel are based on real-life persons. In an otherwise excellent discussion of the topic, David Rolston (1997:332) misquotes one of the commentators as saying:

It is a pity that it is not prudent to note down all the [real] names of the characters throughout the book. (his brackets)

If this translation were correct, it would indicate that most or all "characters throughout the book" are based on real-life models. A closer look at the original text (and context), however, reveals that the opposite is true:

During the past 30 years, I have run into quite a few people who are like J��ng��ng, and quite a few people who are even worse than J��ng��ng. What a pity that it would be improper to note down their distinguished names one by one.

��ئ�����������֮���˲��٣��������������Ͳ��٣�ϧ����һһע������(reference??)

First of all, the comment relates to only one character, viz., ?? ������, not to most or all "characters throughout the book". Second, this comment is made in praise of the realistic description of a type of person that the commentator recognises from his own life; it says nothing about real-life models on which the author has based his descriptions.

Another misunderstanding regards the early commentaries' use of affective terms of endearment of the following types:

- beginning with ?- ��, as in ?-Fèng ���P for X��fèng

- ending in -xi��ng ��, as in Yù-xi��ng ���� for B��oyù

- ending in -q��ng ��, as in Dài-q��ng ���� or Pín-q��ng �A�� for Dàiyù

Even a scholar like Anthony C. Yu (1997:11f), who argues, in my mind correctly, for the fictional qualities of the novel rather than its autobiographical nature, wrongly interprets this usage as indicating that the characters in the novel reflect real persons with whom the commentators are or once were on intimate terms. In fact, however, such affective terms only reflect the kind of intimacy any reader may feel in relation to fictional characters. Similar terms are also used by 18th-century commentators, who had no idea about the historical background of the novel: ?-Fèng ���P for X��fèng, B��o-g�� ���� for B��oyù, etc.[8] One such commentator quotes with contempt readers who admire B��och��i and say "I love B��o-q��ng" �Ґی��� (ch. 4). This is, of course, no indication of autobiographical authenticity.

So while it remains true that some elements of The Red Chamber Dream are built around memories of a lost past, and that some events and objects referred to in the novel have a real-life basis, there is no consistent connection between any of the novel's characters and real-life persons. In spite of its autobiographical elements, The Red Chamber Dream is first and foremost a work of fiction.

Fiction as self-expression

One might think that the self-expressive aspects of The Red Chamber Dream are directly linked to its autobiographical elements, and that these are more personal, genuine and charged with emotion than the fictional elements. But this is not at all obvious. On the contrary, as modern authors sometimes point out, fiction makes it easier to be personal and genuine than autobiography, since the latter necessitates a larger degree of caution in order to protect both the author and the people around him. Fiction gives more freedom.[9]

Chapter 13 of The Red Chamber Dream provides one example of the problems an author may run into if he is too directly autobiographical. The original story of Qín K��q��ng's �ؿ��� suicide after her affair with her father-in-law was revealed (and maybe was about to produce offspring, see chapter 5) was conceived by one of the commentators as being too close to painful events they had themselves witnessed in real life, and he "ordered" �� the author to change this passage and cover up the suicide, in other words, to make the novel less directly autobiographical.

Fiction is less problematic in this respect, because it is not so directly revealing. But exactly because it is written in an indirect language that even the author himself may not always be able to decode, it may give room for more personal themes than autobiographical writing. In this respect, fictional imagination resembles the images of dreams, which may be highly personal, though difficult to interpret. Like dreams, works of fiction may be authentic without being autobiographical in any literal sense. The distance from things close at hand involved in their fantasy world creates an open space for the exploration of larger psychological issues.

Comparing this to the free associations of psychoanalysis may be stretching it a bit, but there are similarities. The sharing of associations in the supposedly safe setting of a therapy session is not just an opportunity to give vent to feelings or frustrations, but may also form the basis for new insights and bring the patient beyond his or her starting point. The fantasy world of the novel, at once both clearly delimitated and boundless, may provide the author and the reader with a suitable setting for venturing into realms of the mind that are usually kept closed and hidden.

If The Red Chamber Dream were only a novel about the author's personal experiences, it would hardly be worthy of the enormous amount of interest it has engendered. But in a sense, we all come from fractured and ruptured childhoods. We do not need to know the author's life history to recognise both the pains and the pleasures of his novel. The fact that for a long time, readers of The Red Chamber Dream knew next to nothing about the author, not even his name, did not reduce their obsession with his novel and its characters. Few readers have experienced exactly the kind of downfall that is described in the novel, but the complex web of riddles surrounding the destiny of its characters is not all that different from the riddles of our own lives. The combination of distance and intimacy involved in the imaginary world of the novel enables the author to transcend his own narrow quest for meaning and to get closer to the core of psychological and existential issues of a more generally human nature.

The psychological expressivity of fiction may be compared to the emotional expressivity of music. Robert Greenberg (??) argues for the self-expressive nature of Beethoven's symphonies, while at the same time showing that some of his most optimistic and merry symphonies were actually written in a period of his life when reliable sources show him as deeply depressed, perhaps because the writing of music provided him with rare opportunities to enter into brighter moods. [10] While a similar discrepancy is not known to have existed in the case of Cáo Xu��qín, the little we happen to know about his life hardly serves as an ultimate clue to the many enigmas posed by his novel.

The psychological expressivity of The Red Chamber Dream, therefore, resides in the text itself, not in its relation to the actual author's biography. Its authenticity is not based on literal truth, but on psychological truth. The novel projects an image of an author whose feelings are represented in the text, sometimes by saying so explicitly (in chapter 1), but mostly through the presence in the text of an almost bewildering array of at times conflicting emotions and impulses. These include the themes of love and pain, guilt and shame declared as the novel's main themes by author and narrator in chapter 1, but also the underlying issues of aggression, violence, shamelessness and the seemingly endless pursuit of narcissistic gratification that not only characterises the unsympathetic male lechers in the novel, but also its main protagonist Ji�� B��oyù.

Throughout The Red Chamber Dream, fictional freedom clearly has priority over autobiographical veracity. The larger themes related to the fall of the family does contain autobiographical elements, and the same is true of a number of details, both objects and events. But all the characters and the majority of objects and events are fictional. And even the autobiographical elements are usually twisted beyond recognition, creating layer upon layer of wonderful dream-worlds, beginning with the Róngguó �s�� and Níngguó  ���� mansions, proceeding through the ephemeral beauty of the Prospect Garden ���^�@ to the ethereal heavenliness of the Land of Illusion ̫̓�þ�. The famous couplet about the truth of falsehood (������r�����) and the existence of nothingness (�О�o̎�o߀��) points precisely to this seeming paradox of the truthfulness of fictional fantasies. At times, fiction (like dreams) is a better vehicle of authentic self-expression and self-exploration than autobiography.

Text and context

The author's biography is but one of a number of smaller and larger settings, or contexts, that have been a major concern of modern scholarship on The Red Chamber Dream. In the past few decades, Western studies of the novel have been comparatively uninterested in the life and death of Cáo Xu��qín, but have tended instead to focus their interest on the novel's larger sociocultural and literary settings. Again, however, the interest in settings has sometimes brought the attention away from the very core of the literary project, the text itself.

My own priority of text over context is not meant to deny the relevance of settings, whether biographical, sociocultural or intertextual. Like all use of language, a literary work derives much of its meaning from such settings. For instance, it certainly would have influenced our interpretations of The Red Chamber Dream greatly if we were to discover that its author were female rather than male, especially since gender is such a central issue in the novel. To give a more realistic example, our knowledge about the different authorship of the first 80 and the last 40 chapters has clear consequences both for my interpretation of the novel and for that of many other scholars, since we choose to treat the last 40 chapters as a sequel to The Red Chamber Dream rather than a part of it. And an understanding of the larger sociocultural and literary settings of the novel may be necessary for a correct interpretation of its linguistic and literary signs. The many fine studies of, inter alia, its literary uses of stone lore (Wang 1992), its debts to the so-called late Ming cult of qíng �� 'love; emotions' (Li 1993; Epstein 2001; Huang 2001), its underlying gender norms (Edwards 1994), the falling apart of literati culture (Xiao 2001), autobiographical sensibilities (Huang 1995), and the Buddhist orientation of literary milieux (Li 2004) have provided us with insights into the novel's literary genealogy and thereby helped us gaining a deeper understanding of the pieces of its mosaic. The study of context is an important prerequisite for the true close-reading of a text.

A text, however, is more than just a pastiche of other texts or a mosaic of quotations, borrowings, intertextuality, allusions, external influences, and cultural clichés. Even if all the pieces of a novel were derived from other sources, the way these pieces are put together attests to the personal presence of a subject, the textual presence of the author. Although none of the studies mentioned look away from this fact, their focus on the larger settings of the novel sometimes lead them to interpret it in ways that fit with the novel's literary or cultural background, but fits less well with the text itself. For instance, the novel's many stories about characters who die as a consequence of their heartfelt but illicit love are typically read as cautionary tales of a type that has many predecessors in Chinese literary history.[11] The contrast, however, between these characters and the group of lechers who emerge from their loveless sexual pursuits unscathed has been consistently overlooked, simply because it does not seem to fit with any of the preexisting patterns. Rather than being traditional cautionary tales, the stories of death due to heartfelt love bear witness to a highly personal and deepseated fear of attachment, as I shall argue further in chapter 2.

Another smaller trend in the study of The Red Chamber Dream regards the setting in which the novel was, not written, but read, in particular how it was received and understood by Qing dynasty commentators (Rolston 1989; Rolston 1997). Of particular interest is the study of the commentaries in the early handwritten manuscripts of the novel, the Zh��yànzh��i commentaries, since at least some of them were written by people who knew the author well and were part of his most immediate readership even while the novel was still being produced (cf. Chan 19??). Again, however, it is a well-known fact that even commentators who were on intimate terms with the author had views of the novel that clearly diverge from the novel itself. They tend, for instance, to be much more unequivocally orthodox and conservative in their interpretations than the novel seems to warrant.[12] The idea that the stories of love-induced death should be read as cautionary tales originates in one of these commentators.[13]

To use Roland Barthes' play on words, even the author himself should not be seen as an "author-ity" on the text he has written.[14] Parts of chapter 1 of The Red Chamber Dream may be read as the author's comments on his own literary work, placing it in opposition to conventional stories of talented men and beautiful women ���Ӽ���. However, these parts are written in a playful tone, pretending that Cáo Xu��qín is only an editor rather than the author of the entire novel, and vastly exaggerating the mimetic realism of the work. The novel is, we are told, about "??" �����H���H„���@�ׂ�Ů��, and the author is said to "??" �����ԼӴ��. We are also told that the novel "??" ��ּՄ��, and that it is an expression of the author's tears (һ������I). While most critics agree that reducing Cáo Xu��qín to the role of editor is just a playful move (or a maneuver to steer clear of the threat of censorship), they tend to take the parts supporting an autobiographical reading of the novel much more seriously, leading to the aforementioned exaggerations regarding the autobiographical nature of the novel. The critics have also tended to accept a reading of the novel as a tearful account of love and emotions, which is certainly part of the truth, but which has led, as we shall see in chapter 3, to a common disregard for the aggression and violence that are also integral to the work as a whole.

Just as in psychotherapy, the attempts of a patient to sum up the themes that have been touched upon during a therapeutic session are likely to be simplistic and superficial, an author's comments on his own novel are much more likely to tend towards the conventional than the work itself. Even if we look away from the playful tone of the author's comments in chapter 1 of The Red Chamber Dream, therefore, these comments should be looked upon as pieces in the larger mosaic of the novelistic text, not as external authoritative statements of its meaning. The authority of interpretation lies not in the author (and certainly not in any specific reader[s]), but resides within the text itself.

Author and reader

A text, however, is not just dead marks on paper. The mere existence of these marks attests to the presence of a dynamic relation between a sender and a receiver, between an author and a reader, and this dynamic relation will be the focus of the present project. In this context, we are not discussing the actual author, but the author as represented in the text, the implied author. Nor are we discussing any specific real reader(s), but an image of the reader warranted by the text, the implied reader.[15]

Any text paints an image of its author, of a person using his skills and the material available to him to produce a written work with certain intended or unintended effects. For instance, although 19th-century critics of The Red Chamber Dream knew nothing about Cáo Xu��qín's real life (and were not even certain of the author's identity), they kept referring to the author as if they knew his intentions, as in the following example:

The arrival of Sh�� Xi��ngyún [in the novel] is particularly sloppy. The author does not set much store by her character.

ʷ��녳�������ʣ����߲����䠑����

(Ba jia pingpi, ch 13)

And even before textual and historical research revealed the details of the tremendous losses suffered by the author's family when their estate was raided by imperial mandate in 1728, when Cáo Xu��qín was probably around 13 years old, the sense of tragic loss that pervades the entire novel was obvious to most readers. The late Qing author Liú È ����, for instance, referred to The Red Chamber Dream as a product of the author's tears.[16]

The image of the author projected by a novel does not have to correspond to the actual producer of the text, whether the difference is deliberate or not. Also, the implied author may differ from the narrator, as is the case when the narrator (or rather one of the narrators) of The Red Chamber Dream is quite critical in his assessment of the main protagonist Ji�� B��oyù �Z����, while the novel as a whole – the implied author – takes great delight in his eccentricities.

Ideally, the implied author's universe is recreated in the reader. But again, the actual responses of real readers may differ widely from the responses warranted by the novel itself, what we might call the implied reader. Real readers will always be shaped by their own personal and historical backgrounds. In some cases, this may help them focus on aspects of the novel that have been overlooked by readers with different backgrounds, and I hope my own interest in psychological and structural aspects of the novel is an example of this. In other cases, however, the cognitive bias of a reader or a group of readers may lead to misinterpretations or overinterpretations with insufficient basis in the actual text. In this book, we shall discuss several instances of such skewed interpretations, including the sentimentalised views that tend to exaggerate the centrality of the triangular love relation between Ji�� B��oyù, Lín Dàiyù ������ and Xu�� B��och��i Ѧ���O, and to make Wáng X��fèng �����P look both more mean and less important than the text actually indicates. In such cases, received ideas about the novel have to be confronted with the text itself. The attempt is to look through distorted interpretations made by actual readers, in order to get closer to the psychological universe of the implied reader. I am, of course, well aware that I myself am a real and utterly fallible reader, but in principle (if not in reality), I would like my analysis to approach the ideal represented by the relation between the implied author and the implied reader.

In fact, the implied author and the implied reader represent two aspects of the same interpretation of the novel. But treating them as separate units, however abstract and idealised, enables us to take into account the dynamic and relational aspects of the text, without falling into the trap of reducing the text to its actual author's intentions (as in the traditional biographical model) or its real readers' responses (as in Roland Barthes' model). The dynamic relation between author and reader is sometimes made explicit in the novel, as in the opening part of chapter 1:

            ??

��λ���٣�����˕��ĺζ������f����ɣ��m�����ƣ������t����Ȥζ�������Œ��ˁ�vע������ʹ�����Ȼ����

However we interpret the reference of terms like ?? ���� (real author, implied author or fictional narrator?) and ?? ����� or ?? ��� (real, implied or fictional readers?), the author-reader relation is a central part of any novel.

Genuineness

For a psychotherapeutic dialogue to be effective, the patient needs to be genuine. This implies not just speaking the truth in a superficial sense, but allowing himself to enter into domains of the mind in which he is not entirely in control. The same is true of the author of a novel. It makes a substantial difference whether the author (as projected by the text) is genuine in his exploration of human existence or is just consciously striking a pose, displaying an appearance of self-expression and self-exploration but not the reality.

Historically, the idea of the author "venting [his] wrath to tell [his] pent-up feelings" �l�������� goes back to The Songs of Ch�� ���o[17] and has been repeated over and over again in the course of Chinese literary history, in prose as well as poetry. Such repeated declarations of wrath and pent-up feelings led the Song dynasty philosopher Zh�� X�� ���� to complain about "people who moan and groan when they are not in pain" �o����ʹ������������,[18] in other words, people who strike a painful pose without genuine suffering.

Later in history, the issue of authenticity rose to renewed prominence in what is often called the late Ming cult of qíng, with its focus on self-expression as opposed to the conventions and stereotypes of Confucian officialdom. This movement soon developed its own stereotypical modes of behaviour and speech, and although The Red Chamber Dream was written more than a century later, it (like other 18th-century novels) does not shy away from such clichés and late Ming buzzwords as absurdity (����), weirdness (��Ƨ), foolish infatuation (��), the worship of young girls (ȹ�O), as well as the very notion of qíng. Even its concern with authenticity (��) belongs within the same standard repertoire and is hardly original. The novel's interest in subtle feelings, extraordinary beauty, precocious talent and free-spirited playfulness may also be read in this light.

So is the author only pretending to be genuine, while in fact just adhering to the cultural norms of the anti-conventional movement inherited from the late Ming? Or should perhaps the many tearful passages of The Red Chamber Dream be seen as belonging to the Ch��cí tradition of "moaning and groaning", not because the actual author may not have been in real pain, but because the novel's almost excessive concern with tragic love, dramatic death, deep frustration and tearful desperation are signs of self-pitying sentimentality rather than genuine exploration of authentic feelings and impulses?

The answer is, of course, that The Red Chamber Dream is much more than just sentimental clichés. As I hope will be clear from the discussions of psychological structures in the following chapters, the novel reads like a genuinely personal document exploring emotional and existential issues with an open mind, without locking its narrative into preconceived patterns of ideology or moralism. The stereotypes and clichés are there, but so are their opposites and alternative points of view, and together they constitute a polyphonic and multivalent web of meaning.[19] The sentimentality represented by Ji�� B��oyù only constitutes one of a number of equally valid perspectives on the events unfolding in the novel. And while the values associated with qíng are perhaps most prominent in the text, the values of Buddhist or Daoist transcendence and even of Confucian propriety are also presented as equally viable alternatives – or perhaps, equally unviable, since the underlying emotion remains one of despair and hopelessness. The Red Chamber Dream contains, in the words of Milan Kundera, “not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths”. It plunges into the great existential theme of qíng with an exploratory attitude based on the “wisdom of uncertainty”.[20] While it is hardly a product of free associations in the psychoanalytical sense, its dense texture and organic composition give room for a wealth of impulses some of which are most certainly spontaneous rather than planned, and some of which may have been unconscious or semi-conscious rather than conscious and deliberate.

This form of self-expression and self-exploration does not imply that the novel somehow represents the entire mindset of its actual author, as Liú Shàngsh��ng (1997) seems to suggest when he attempts to recreate Cáo Xu��qín's "psycho-biography" and then to understand the novel in light of the author's psychological complexes and traumas. With few exceptions, Liú's hypotheses concerning Cáo Xu��qín's psycho-biography are based on interpretations of the novel itself, so interpreting the novel on the basis of these hypotheses is at best a circular endeavour. Rather, the emotional authenticity of The Red Chamber Dream resides in its willingness to express and explore the many contradictory impulses related to some aspect of human existence. In order for this to happen, it is likely that the contents of the novel must somehow resonate with certain facets of the author's conscious or unconscious mind, but certainly not with his entire psycho-biography. In the end, the main issue lies not in the actual author, but in a text that has the ability to elicit genuine responses from empathic readers.

Empathy

If a patient needs to be genuine, the other part of a psychotherapeutic dialogue, the therapist, needs to be empathic, responding with sensitivity to all parts of the patient's message, including unintended slips of the tongue and other parts over which the patient has little control and may not even be aware. A similar challenge meets the reader of a novel.[21]

This book represents my attempt at being an empathic reader. And empathy is more than taking all claims of the novel at face value and certainly more than understanding the author's intentions. I shall feel obliged to respond to all parts of the text, even inconsistencies or underlying structures of which the author himself may have been unaware, but which betrays subcurrents in the mental universe of the text that are otherwise easily overlooked.

For instance, I shall try to respond not only to the novel's sometimes idealised image of its main protagonist as a heroic defender of the values of qíng, but also to the less flattering image, repeatedly slipping through the textual surface, of his self-absorbed egocentrism and his sometimes surprising lack of genuine commiseration with the fate of others, the consequences of which are sometimes just as destructive as the evil actions of the more openly egotistic characters of the novel. And in addition to taking seriously the claims of the first chapter that the novel is mainly about love and tears, I shall argue that this is just one half of the story and that the novel is in fact just as much concerned with aggression and violence, only that these impulses are relegated to the outskirts of its spheres of sympathy and identification.

Psychological issues

Like any use of modern Western analytical terminology, my use of psychological terms may look anachronistic and culturally inapt. As is well known by now, many aspects of Freud's theory of psychoanalysis were not only products of the modern Western world, but even more narrowly of the Vienna bourgeoisie of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.[22] This applies most notably to the idea of the sexual drive as the most decisive force behind psychological development, shaped as it was by Victorian sexual taboos and the neuroses they produced. If we look away from such theoretical excesses, however, many of the concepts and ideas of psychodynamic theory have proven useful not only in a larger Western setting, but also in discussing psychological issues in a Chinese and, for that matter, non-modern context. In fact, modern Western notions often seem to me to do more justice to the psychological issues involved in The Red Chamber Dream than most traditional Chinese notions, which are too often blind to psychological detail. My aim is not to force the novel into an alien conceptual framework, but to use these terms to help us identify some of the psychological issues at work.

If my goal were to search for cultural settings and historical backgrounds, it would have made more sense to try to understand the psychological issues of The Red Chamber Dream in terms of Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist ideas about the mind. For instance, the ambivalence towards qíng 'basic instincts; emotions; love' within the various strands of Neo-Confucian thought is undoubtedly of great relevance to the novel's treatment of feelings. So is the scepticism towards yù ��/�j 'desire' in all the traditional schools of thought. Buddhist ideas about karma are of particular relevance to the issue of love, lust and death, which looms large in parts of the novel. And Daoist and Buddhist ideas concerning the distinction between 'liking' and 'disliking' (�Ð�) are directly relevant to my discussions in the following chapters of the novel's realms of sympathy and antipathy.

However, the traditional schools of thought evince only very limited interest in the subtle details of emotions and psychological impulses. Much of the time, they only refer to individual emotions in standardised lists (such as x�� nù ��i lè ϲŭ���� 'joy and anger, sorrow and delight'), treating all emotions as no more than examples of the overarching category of qíng, not as independent phenomena that are of interest in and by themselves.  Even when these schools do refer to individual emotions, their treatment of emotions is usually subordinated to their all-embracing moral or soteriological concerns. For instance, they sometimes group together emotions that are believed to have a morally or soteriologically adverse effect, as in Buddhist ideas about t��n ch��n ch�� ؝���� 'greed, anger and folly'. They also sometimes display an interest in specific states of mind that are believed to play a central role in the process of spiritual liberation, as in the notion of yí �� 'doubt' within certain branches of Chán �U.

Compared to these schools of thought, Chinese fiction shows a more particular interest in the details of emotions and psychological impulses. In novels, this interest may be traced back at least to The Plum in the Golden Vase ��ƿ÷, written about 150 years earlier than The Red Chamber Dream, and in shorter prose all the way back to Tang dynasty tales (����) such as "The Story of Y��ngy��ng" �L�L��.

Even within the realm of fiction, however, The Red Chamber Dream represents a clear innovation. Its unusual degree of psychological subtlety is a feature that makes it stand apart from all its predecessors and that prompted C. T. Hsia to see it as an example of psychological realism. Martin Huang's (1995; 2001) fine studies of the novel's autobiographical elements and its treatment of desire are examples of close-readings that do take some of its psychological subtleties into account. By looking into how a few basic psychological themes shape not only individual characters or passages in the novel, but its entire structure and texture, I hope to bring the psychological study of this novel one step further.

My priority of text over context allows me to be more concerned with the particularities of this specific novel than with its philosophical and novelistic predecessors, its literary genealogy. I will not shy away from using terms and notions from modern psychology whenever they seem to capture psychological nuances to which traditional Chinese schools of thought were more or less blind, though I will by no means bring the entire arsenal of psychoanalytic theory into my discussions. The many references to the therapeutic dialogue are meant to highlight certain facets of the dynamic relation between author and reader, not to express a view of the novel as a psychotherapeutic tool.

I will at times refer to unconscious impulses on the part of the (actual or implied) author. This is not because I am particularly concerned with the exact distinction between conscious and unconscious elements, which may be futile anyway, but because I want to emphasise that my claims about the novel are not claims about the author's conscious intentions, only about the themes emerging from the text as we read it. In The Red Chamber Dream, for instance, the themes associated with love, lust and death that are so prominent in the chapters immediately preceding the building of the idealised and seemingly pure world of the Prospect Garden ���^�@ return to the fore as soon as the garden idyll begins to seriously fall apart. I refer to this with the Freudian term 'the return of the repressed', without pretending to be able to determine whether the author actually "meant" it this way (he had, of course, never read Freud), or whether this represented repressed material on the part of the author. Whether or not the author was aware of it, the novel does seem to keep a lid on these themes for a long time (with a few interruptions) until the lid finally blows off as the innocent pleasures of life in the garden are eventually replaced by one sex-related disaster after another.

As Peter Brooks (1994:20ff.) has pointed out, psychoanalytic literary criticism has often "mistaken the object of analysis". This is most obvious when the object of analysis is taken to be the characters of a novel, as if they were real persons with real childhoods and real traumas and complexes and not creations of a literary mind with many other concerns than psychological mimesis (see, for instance, Ping 19??). In my own attempt at an empathic reading of The Red Chamber Dream, psychological issues relating to each individual character are important only to the extent that they shed light on larger issues in the text as a whole, which they often do. For instance, although the theme of love, lust and death does involve individual characters, the way it points to relations and contrasts between characters and even groups of characters is much more important for a reading of the entire novel. Furthermore, although this theme is enacted in and between the characters of the novel, with the author and the reader as seemingly passive spectators, I shall argue that the roles of author and reader are more active than usually assumed, especially in bringing about the death of the love- and lust-ridden characters.

The psychological presence of author and reader in the text is even more obvious in another theme with which I shall be concerned in the following chapters, the contrast between sympathy and antipathy. This is a kind of meta-theme primarily expressed in the relation between the characters of the novel on the one hand and the author and the reader on the other, the latter feeling either sympathy or antipathy (or anything in between) towards the former. Still, as I have already made clear, my psychological analysis of The Red Chamber Dream is neither concerned with the actual author, as in traditional psychoanalytical criticism, nor with any particular real reader(s), as in some later work of psychoanalytical criticism.[23] My object of analysis is the text itself, and I am concerned with psychological issues pertaining to the dynamic relation between implied author and implied reader.