Reflections on Dream of the Red Chamber By Liu Zaifu

My homeland has nothing to do with those suspecting eyes or those hectoring voices or the apparatus of linguistic power that distorts me, none of which will ever understand the green meadow in my soul and the dragonflies and butterflies fluttering over the meadow.

6.

Dream of the Red Chamber is not confined to concepts. Nor is its pursuit of emotional trajectories limited to a world with a beginning and an end. It defies the logic of finite time and fixed values. It also defies the conventional notion of causality. As a result, it gives rise to a boundless artistic world that exists above truth and falsity, good and evil, and cause and effect. As its lingering sentiments and thoughts cross the boundaries of time and space, it provides people with inexhaustible topics.

Some writers write with their heads, some with their souls, and still others with their whole lives. Cao Xueqin is one of those writers writing with their souls and he lives completely involved. He embraces life and pours his soul into his work. Integrated into the universe, life becomes for him a realm of freedom that refuses to be defined by conventional values.

7.

The momentous wars displayed in Greek epics are not wars of good versus evil and have nothing to do with justice or injustice. Both the winners and the losers are heroes. These heroes are pushed by their fates and behind the fates lie their personalities. Had Homer believed “whoever wins is the king, whoever loses is the bandit,” the great epics would not have been produced. Fates and personalities are parts of human life, whereas justice and injustice are political and moral concepts. The poetry in Greek epics comes from life, not concepts.

If one can call The Iliad an epic of heroism, Dream of the Red Chamber can be called an epic of gentility. In the former all the heroes are uninhibited male heroes, and the foremost hero, Achilles, is even very rude, paying no respect to his opponent Hector (the greatest Trojan warrior), a fallen hero. On the surface, the main story—the war between Greece and Troy—is a war over a beauty (Helen), but in fact neither side really respects the female gender, since they both consider the beauty (a woman) a prey.