Rereading the Stone: Desire and the Making of Fiction in Dream of the Red Chamber

Abstract

18th-century Hongloumeng, known in English as Dream of the Red Chamber or The Story of the Stone is considered to be one of the greatest of Chinese novels, blending realism and romance, psychological motivation and fate, daily life and mythical occurences, as it narrates the decline of a powerful Chinese family. This study examines the novel as a story about fictive representation. Through literary devices, the novel challenges the authority of history as well as referential biases in reading. This text argues that at the heart of the novel is the narration of desire. Desire appears in this tale as the defining trait and problem of human beings and, at the same time, shapes the novel's literary invention and effect. Through close readings of selected episodes, the text analyzes principal motifs of the narrative, such as dream, mirror, literature, religious enlightenment, and rhetorical reflexivity in relation to fictive representation. It contextualizes its discussion with a comprehensive genealogy of quing - desire, disposition, sentiment, feeling - a concept of fundamental importance in historical Chinese culture, and shows how the text exploits its multiple meanings.