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A verbal paradise visualized: An ekphrasistic study of the "Daguanyuan" in Cao Xueqin's "Hongloumeng"
Abstract
The Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong Lou Meng), written by Cao Xueqin (1715 or 1724–1763 or 1764), is considered as a pinnacle in Chinese literature. In the past two and half centuries, redology has made a long journey and generated a large canon of criticism. This canon continues to grow through a constant process of correcting, reconstructing and re-polarization of the texts. Despite the depth and breadth of the secondary material, new lacunas continue to emerge as recent studies open up new avenues and approaches and invite yet further discussion. This dissertation is a tentative exploration of one of these new areas in that it applies the insights of Western aesthetic theory, specifically the analytical insights of the concept of ekphrasis, to the presentation in the novel of the Daguanyuan or "Grand View Garden." The dissertation opens with a comprehensive introduction to the Hongloumeng, its textual tradition and a the various critical approaches to the novel (hongxue or "redology") that developed over the centuries, concluding that the current approaches have run their course and that more innovative strategies are now needed especially given the way the novel has entered the mainstream of popular culture. The second chapter looks at garden imagery in a variety of cultures and is followed by a chapter introducing the concept of ekphrasis, the origin of the term and its development in the modern period. The fourth chapter looks in detail at the picture-making capacity of words in Hongloumeng with particular emphasis on the Daguanyuan, but not restricted to it. The fifth chapter considers the image as a rhetorical device with particular emphasis on the garden in the novel. The sixth chapter considers the notion of "reverse ekphrasis," that is the various attempts to depict the novel’s garden in drawings or in actual parks (there is one such garden in Beijing and another in Shanghai, both popular tourist attractions). The concluding chapter looks at ekphrasis in the “poetic moment,” that is the way in which ekphrastic language is used in the poems scattered throughout the text which have a bearing on the garden and its contents such as the poems on chrysanthemums in chapter thirty-eight.^
... Each chapter begins with a couplet summarizing its content with epigrammatic brevity. These aspects of DRC have been discussed in a number of qualitative studies (Li, 2015;Ma, 2018;Soong, 1977;Wu, 2010). ...
In this study, we provide a quantitative analysis of prose and verse in the classical Chinese novel, Dream of the Red Chamber (DRC), and discuss the implications for the disputed authorship of the novel. Firstly, we examine the amount of verse in across the chapters of DRC, and compare the style of the verse and prose portions of DRC. Secondly, a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of DRC is performed based on the prose portions of the novel. Lastly, we discuss the implications of our experimental results for authorship attribution as well as descriptive stylistic analysis of DRC. Our authorial analysis largely confirms the findings of some previous studies that the novel has two authors. Meanwhile, stylistic analyses of the prose portions of the novel yield new and interesting results, which demonstrates that stylometric tools can be used to facilitate descriptive studies of classical Chinese literature.
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