Reflections on Dream of the Red Chamber By Liu Zaifu

When alive, many females in Dream of the Red Chamber pursue a poetic way of life. When they realize the lack of poetry in their lives, they die in ways that are also very poetic. The deaths of Lin Daiyu, You Sanjie, Skybright, and Faithful are all poems.

One cannot understand music if there is no music in one’s heart. Nor can one understand poetry if there is no poetry in one’s heart. Only when there is poetry in life can one possess poetic sensibility. The reason why musicians and poets often lament the difficulty in getting people to understand them is that there are very few people with music or poetry in their hearts. For the same reason, if one has no soul, it will be difficult for one to understand the calls from the soul in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky or to understand the paradox of the soul in Cao Xueqin. (Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai embody the paradox in Cao Xueqin’s soul.) Some people read classics with their lives and souls, some with their sense organs, and still others with political or commercial purposes in their minds. The last two groups are very far away from Cao Xueqin.

14.

The most intense poetry comes from life. The center of epic is not history but poetry, and its poetry comes from life, not history. Dream of the Red Chamber represents a historical era in its entirety, and, at the same time, it also creates a series of images of poetic lives. Cao Xueqin presents history as real life experience. As he critiques history with real life as his frame of reference, he imbues his novel with a lifelike atmosphere. In the maidservants, whom historians consider beneath their notice because of their lowly status, he discovers lofty yearnings impregnated with inexhaustible poetry. There is only one way to find out whether poetry has disappeared from the culture of a nation, and that is by seeing whether dignity of life and vitality of life still exist. As far as a nation is concerned, when life becomes snobbish, servile, and can in no way stand up on its own, the culture it carries will lose its poetry. As an elegy for poetic life, Dream of the Red Chamber sounds an alarm for Chinese culture.