1
“Prosaic Profundity: The Dream of the Red Chamber and Clarissa as Higher Narratives”
I am going to speak about two of the world’s greatest early novels, Hongloumeng and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, as higher narratives, but before I do so, it will be helpful to explain what I mean by higher narrative. The term was coined by our friend the late Earl Miner, a distinguished comparatist whose recent death we mourn and to whose memory the Committee on Intercultural Studies is dedicating this volume of essays on this literary genre, as defined by Earl.
I. Cross-Cultural Implications of “Higher Narrative”
In paper he published in Japan in 1998, Earl speculated about the nature of what he called “higher narrative.” [1] He makes his speculations his available in English in a paper, as yet unpublished, entitled “Describing Higher Narrative,” a version of which Earl delivered as a conference in Kyoto in 1997. In September 2000, Earl sent me a revised version of this talk, which we will include in our volume of essays on higher narrative. Earl begins his essay with quotations that span different cultures and historical moments, including Britain during the period following the Restoration of the monarchy in the late seventeenth century and Japan in the Heian period. What is clear, from the start of Earl’s essay, is that his definition of higher narrative is going to be broad enough to include both Dryden’s notion of the “Heroick Poem,” which Dryden considered “undoubtedly the greatest Work which the soul of Man is capable to perform,”[2] as well as the Japanese genre of monogatari. Higher narrative, for Earl Miner, was most definitely a cross-cultural phenomenon, and it could be composed either in verse, like the heroic poem praised by Dryden, or in prose, like that most famous example of monogatari, The Tale of Genji.
Higher narrative “is distinguished” by “elevation, dignity, and grandeur.”[3] Its medium is words, and it is “literary,”[4] by which Earl appears to mean “fictive,” although he quickly adds that “other kinds such as the historical must be borne in mind.” Higher narrative has “a sequential continuum to some end, a continuum which need not have a plot, although it almost always does to some degree.”[5] Why this consideration given to a narrative that needn’t have a plot? Because, I believe, “plot” (Aristotle’s mythos) is too exclusively Western, a preoccupation too closely tied to the notion of mimesis (“representation”). For Aristotle a work of literature is, above all, an imitation or representation of an action, and the soul of a work of literature is its plot, its mythos. But in traditional Chinese and Japanese narrative, the Greek notion of “representation” is an alien concept. Authors are concerned with conveying affect rather than with representing a single and complete action. Moreover, in traditional China it was “history” rather than fiction that was held in the highest esteem. In chapter nine of the Poetics, Aristotle makes his famous distinction between poetry and history. He states his decided preference for poetry, since poetry is, for Aristotle, a superior form of representation: poetry represents the universal, while history is limited to the particular. For Aristotle, the Homeric poems are the great examples of higher narrative, not the works of the historians Herodotus or Thucydides. In contrast to Aristotle, according to Earl Miner’s definition, fictiveness – while privileged – is not essential to higher narrative, since “other kinds such as the historical must be borne in mind.” [6] Sima Qian’s Records of the Historian (Shiji) would thus qualify as higher narrative, as would Spring and Autumn Annals, attributed to Confucius, as well as the Zuozhuan, i.e. the Zuo commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals. Earl’s conception of higher narrative accommodates both Aristotelian theory and East Asian literary tradition.[7]
The second of the quotations with which Earl introduces his paper suggests that higher narrative has a problematic relation with the form of narrative that would sweep Europe in the eighteenth century and that would become the dominant literary form of narrative in the centuries that followed, into our own time. Earl cites Maya Slater, who in 1997 observes, “The Académie Française rigorously monitored other genres, but left the novel alone. The reason was simple: the novel was beneath its notice.” [8]
In the spirit of Earl’s reflections on higher narrative, my remarks will attempt to show how two works from two very different literary traditions – one from the East, the other from the West – may be said to share a common notion of at least some of the features of higher narrative as described by Earl Miner. And I shall address the problematic relation between the noble pedigree of higher narrative and that upstart genre that was beneath the notice of the Académie Française, the novel.
China and England can justly lay claim to two of the world's greatest literary traditions. The novel was a latecomer to both traditions and it struggled to attain the prestige of other genres such as historical writing or the lyric poem (in China) and the epic or tragedy (in England and the West). The very word for novel in Chinese -- xiaoshuo, "small talk" -- conveys the low regard in which the form was held, in traditional China, in comparison with other genres.[9] I will discuss two of the greatest eighteenth-century novels, Cao Xueqin's (ca. 1715-ca. 1763) Dream of the Red Chamber (Hongloumeng; with the final forty of the full one hundred and twenty chapters composed by Gao E, c. 1740-c. 1815) and Samuel Richardson's (1689-1761) Clarissa, each written at roughly the same time (the first edition of Clarissa appeared in 1747-48; the first printed edition of Hongloumeng appeared in 1791, though Cao himself died some thirty years earlier, two years after the death of Richardson), but emerging from very different cultural milieux. These two monumental novels have much in common besides their length. Both have a tragic trajectory. Both feature protagonists who are forced by their families to marry and whose resistance leads to religious enlightenment. In their religious high seriousness and in their appropriation of more prestigious genres in their respective traditions, both novels lift the genre of the novel to the level of what we might legitimately call “higher narrative.”
Both Cao and Richardson are deeply aware that their fictions may be mistaken for humdrum examples of inconsequential, everyday realism -- the precise opposite of the aims of “higher narrative.” Cao addresses this problem in the very first chapter of his novel and Richardson in the “Postscript” to Clarissa.[10]
II. Hongloumeng, Ye Shi, Zheng Shi, Higher Narrative
In the introductory chapter of Dream of the Red Chamber, a daoist monk [Kong Kong Dao Ren] comes upon a stone on which are carved characters that tell the Stone's story. I mentioned earlier that, for China, the true higher narratives are the great dynastic histories such as Sima Qian’s Shi ji. It is clear, from the monk’s remarks, that, to him, The Story of the Stone bears absolutely no resemblance to such dynastic histories (sometimes referred to as zheng shi 正史), Indeed, for the monk, the Stone is not even in the category of ye shi, or “unofficial” histories, i.e. lower higher narratives. Having deciphered the inscribed characters, the monk then miraculously speaks with the Stone and tells him that he most definitely is not a lower higher narrative, and that he therefore, contrary to the Stone's own wishes, does not deserve to be published. The Stone is not a lower higher narrative, according to the monk, because 1) the story is set in no discoverable dynastic period and 2) “it contains no examples of moral grandeur among its characters -- no statesmanship, no social message of any kind. All I can find in it, in fact, are a number of females, conspicuous, if at all, only for their passion or folly or for some trifling talent or insignificant virtue. Even if I were to copy all this out, I cannot see that it would make a very remarkable book.”[11]
The Stone then defends itself against the charge that he is not a lower higher narrative, such as Sanguo yanyi (conventionally translated as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, though the translation of yanyi as “romance” is misleading, since the English word connotes “a world removed from reality”[12]). His not being a lower higher narrative is, in the Stone’s opinion, distinctly a literary virtue rather than a fault:
“Come, your reverence,” said the stone . . . . “Must you be so obtuse? All the romances [or novels; 野史ye shi ismore accurately translated as “unofficial histories”] ever written have an artificial period setting -- Han or Tang for the most part. In refusing to make use of that stale old convention and telling my Story of the Stone exactly as it occurred, it seems to me that, far from depriving it of anything, I have given it a freshness these other books do not have.
What makes these romances even more detestable is the stilted, bombastic language -- inanities dressed in pompous rhetoric, remote alike from nature and common sense and teeming with the grossest absurdities.
Surely my “number of females,” whom I spent half a lifetime studying with my own eyes and ears, are preferable to this kind of stuff?[13] . . .
In terms of style, then, The Story of the Stone, by the speaking book's own admission, is clearly neither a higher narrative nor even a lower higher narrative, for it is not set in some legendary period of the distant past. Nor does it purport to offer moral instruction in the manner of the great dynastic histories. It does not feature the kind of exemplary Confucian protagonist that Peter H. Lee, for instance, finds characteristic of higher narrative in the early heroic poetry of Korea. Indeed, in contrast to the public and masculinist nature of a higher narrative that features a paradigmatic Confucian hero, The Story of the Stone is filled with female characters. Its level of style is not elevated above the everyday, but rather “records things exactly as they happened [shi lu qi shi 實彔其事].”[14] And rather than convey a moral lesson, it presents itself as no more than “an antidote to boredom and melancholy.”[15]
But there is a hint here that the book’s style of artful self-deprecation, its guise as a harmless diversion, is concealing its higher aims, aims that are certainly higher than the aims of conventional lower higher narratives (ye shi) and even higher than the aims of higher narratives such as the dynastic histories (zheng shi). The book offers itself as an escape and a diversion, it is true, “but even perhaps” the text continues, if its readers "will heed its lesson and abandon their vain and frivolous pursuits,” the result will be “some small arrest in the deterioration of their vital forces.”[16] In this understated and self-deprecatory language not characteristic of higher narrative, The Story of the Stone is suggesting that its pose as a lower narrative is just that: a strategy for engaging the reader and leading him to the kind of important or even sublime truths we associate with higher narrative. Part of the prestige associated with the genre of the official dynastic histories (zheng shi), such as Sima Qian’s Records of the Historian (Shi ji), is derived from the fact that they narrate events that actually took place and that had important consequences for the state. They are based on historical fact. For the ye shi, in contrast, once the author sets his work in a particular dynastic period, he is then free to engage in the fictive, the fanciful, even in the incredible, such as we find, for example, in The Journey to the West (Xiyou ji), which is set in the time of the Tang Dynasty. Hence, when the Stone insists on the historical veracity of the narrative he is telling, he is appropriating the prestige of the truth-telling higher narrative of the dynastic histories (zheng shi). He is doing so, however, for very different ends.
In the case of The Story of the Stone, it is its verisimilitude, its extraordinary lifelikeness that continuously seduces the reader, draws him into the book's vividly imagined world. For Cao, the world of everyday life, the world so vividly and memorably depicted in the novel, is “The Land of Illusion.” As the daoist enters this land with the Stone, the phrase “The Land of Illusion” is inscribed on an archway in large characters, while below it the following couplet is etched “vertically on either side of the arch: ‘When false is taken for true, true becomes false; / If nothing becomes something, something becomes nothing [or, ‘If non-being turns into being, being becomes non-being’].” [17] This couplet contains the instruction offered by the novel. So likelike, so seemingly real, are the characters and events narrated in The Story of the Stone, that we take its illusory reality for reality itself. When we then realize that its seemingly true reality is in fact false, is fictional and therefore illusory, we are being trained to view the things we take to be solid and true as illusory. By virtue of its lofty Buddhist message of necessary detachment, The Story of the Stone is a higher narrative posing as a lower narrative that draws us, as desiring readers, into its false, seductive reality. We are drawn -- by the seductive illusion of a lifelike fiction that explicitly distinguishes itself from the often distancing artificiality of both traditional higher narrative (zheng shi) and of lower higher narrative (ye shi) -- into recognizing the illusory nature of desire and of the world that desire, to our peril, constructs.
III. Clarissa, Tragedy, Higher Narrative
In Clarissa, Richardson similarly lifts the normally lower narrative of the novel to the level of higher narrative, specifically to the level of tragedy. Richardson's is an epistolary novel. It is written as a series of letters about, to, and from Miss Clarissa Harlowe, a young woman of extraordinary character who, against her will, is driven into the clutches of the dashing but manipulative and deceiving Richard Lovelace, who entraps and rapes her. The epistle, which is an intimate form of discourse, was composed in the low style, the genus tenue or humile. In the classical literary tradition of the West, writers and critics have scrupulously observed the principle that there should be a decorous -- that is, a “fitting,” an “appropriate” -- relation between subject matter and style: ordinary, mundane subjects should be treated in an appropriately ordinary, mundane style; elevated and important subjects in an appropriately impassioned and weighty style. The high style is appropriate to the genres of tragedy and epic; it is elevated above the concerns of the everyday and it attempts to evoke, through both the grandeur of its language and of its subject matter, the emotions of wonder and of pathos. The low or plain style -- the style appropriate to genres such as comedy, the epigram, the epistle, and Horatian satire -- is more mundane.
Richardson's materials and subjects are those of lower narrative: domestic life, marriage, with an emphasis upon the inner life, and particularly the inner lives of women. Richardson’s is a style that, in the author’s own words, is often “very circumstantial and minute.”[18] Such minuteness and circumstantiality, in the literary theory of the time, was believed to lower a style, to prevent it from achieving the elevation requisite for tragedy and epic. For Richardson, however, the lofty epic tradition, especially as represented by the Homer of the Iliad, encouraged an uncivilized and unChristian pride and militarism. Achilles’ legendary anger is stripped of its glamor and is transposed, in Richardson’s narrative, into the unbending and inflexible wrath of Clarissa’s brother and father against Lovelace and the virtually blameless Clarissa herself, who offers a model of Christian forgiveness that, from Richardson’s perspective, is entirely absent from Homer’s higher narrative.[19] While Richardson's style conveys “real life” in the manner of the plain style, the author at the same time makes it clear that he was not writing "a mere novel or romance."[20] “I intend more than a Novel or Romance by this Piece,” Richardson writes. “It is of the Tragic kind.”[21]
Clarissa refers to the tale she tells in her letters as “my tragical story.”[22] The story she narrates in letters written in the familiar style, and thus the novel we read, is clearly influenced by tragedy.[23] The noble Clarissa herself loves tragic plays. Much of the novel works towards the challenging task of chipping away at, even finally melting, the icily witty literary preferences of Lovelace. The very essence of a Restoration rake, Lovelace prefers the sparkling pleasures of wit to the pathos of tragedy. Early in the novel, Lovelace requests Clarissa’s company to attend the play of Venice Preserved by the famously moving, “pathetic” playwright, Thomas Otway. “Yet, for my own part,” Lovelace remarks, “I loved not tragedies; though she did, for the sake of the instruction, the warning, and the example generally given in them.”[24]
Lovelace's experience of the tragedy of Clarissa, which the heroine herself writes as “a tragical story” and much of which Lovelace himself reads in the letters he peruses, turns this rake from being a cold and disinterested spectator of tragedy into someone who is tortured by his awareness that he is responsible for Clarissa’s demise. In this sense, Clarissa's tragedy, which she herself pens, has the desired didactic effect, as she describes it a letter to a friend of Lovelace, Mr. John Belford. “And who knows,” she asks Belford soon before she expires, “but that the man who already, from a principle of humanity, is touched at my misfortunes, when he comes to revolve the whole story placed before him in one strong light, and when he shall have the catastrophe likewise before him; and shall become in a manner interested in it: who knows but that from a still higher principle, he may so regulate his future actions as to find his own reward in the everlasting welfare which is wished by his Obliged servant, CLARISSA HARLOWE?”[25] The “whole story placed before him” is, in effect, our novel, The History of Miss Clarissa Harlowe. Lovelace is indeed “touched” at the tale that narrates Clarissa's “misfortunes.” Richardson composes his novel as a tragic tale composed by and about Clarissa, and it is Lovelace's reading of this higher narrative that, eventually, melts the charismatic villain’s hardened heart.