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153 CHAPTER SIX The Art of the Hongloumeng: Poetic Fiction and Open Fiction The Hongloumeng (A Dream of Red Mansions) is the apotheosis of the creative drive in Chinese fictional development that aspires to the condition of verbal art. It exemplifies the conception of pure fiction, poetic fiction, total fiction, metafiction, and, above all, open fiction that I have explored in the previous chapters. I have claimed that even though Cao Xueqin never wrote a treatise on theory of fiction, his novel contains conceptual insights that could be utilized to formulate a theory of fiction. I have already discussed some of his insights concerning fiction’s genesis and condition on a number of occasions . In this chapter, I will further tap the theoretical insights in the novel and attempt to work out a poetics of fictional writing that underlies the novel’s conception through analysis of its thematic concerns and narrative strategies. The formulation of a poetics will contribute to a Chinese system of fiction theory that I will construct in the next chapter. There are literally cartloads of studies of the novel, but not many are concerned with its condition as a verbal art, and still fewer with its contributions to the Chinese theory of fiction. In Anthony C. Yu’s recent study, he breaks new ground in both areas. He unequivocally treats the novel as a verbal art and correctly locates its source of artistry: “[T]he narrative’s merit as verbal art lies in its reflexive and innovative insistence, made through myriad occasions and devices.”1 In critical analysis, he makes a radical shift in focus from what the author writes to how he presents what he writes, and Yu places enormous weight on the novel’s extraordinary use of language, which he identifies as a sure sign of verbal art. Through a fascinating reading of the vicissitudes of the “stone,” he reveals the novel’s artistry as sustained on the inherent relationship between the function of the protagonist and the author’s conception of language, text, story, and narrative strategies.2 He also uncovers a number of connections between the novel’s motifs and literary theory. After a detailed 154 CHINESE THEORIES OF FICTION reading of the stone in terms of Buddhist philosophy, he suggests an “intimated parallel between Buddhist tenets and literary theory.”3 Following the authorial hint at readerly reception in the novel’s opening, he explores “how the process of religious enlightenment may parallel aesthetic discovery and act as a trope of literary effect.”4 I would like to continue where he leaves off. I venture to suggest that there are not just parallels between the novel’s motifs and literary theory; I believe the novel as a whole was conceived, constructed, and composed on the author’s self-conscious awareness of the reciprocity between the making of the novel and the conception of a fiction theory. By this I mean that while engaged in writing the novel, Cao Xueqin was at the same time pondering on a poetics of fiction to be concretized in practice. From what the opening chapter informs us—“Cao Xueqin in his Nostalgia Studio worked on it for ten years, in the course of which he rewrote it no less than five times”5 —we may infer that his practice kept altering his theory and his theory kept influencing his practice. The alternation between theory and practice was repeated so many times that there is no way of telling which ultimately influenced which. Because of this evolutionary genesis, Cao Xueqin was able to write a novel that, as Lu Xun rightly points out, shattered all traditional ideas and modes of writing,6 and became a metafiction. Because of the intense preoccupation with fiction’s rationale, Cao Xueqin turned his novel into a literary text filled with theoretical insights. The Hongloumeng displays a remarkable vision of openness, which comes close to the creative vision that scholars of English literature have discovered in James Joyce’s two masterpieces, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.The making of the novel involves three modes of representation: mimesis, semiosis, and simulation. This tripartite mode of representation enables the novel to become a text that attains the conditions of pure fiction and yields a poetics of open fiction. In following sections, I will explore how the three modes of representation interact and work out Cao Xueqin’s ideas about the ontology, epistemology, conceptual vision, and writing model in...

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