"Why Bao-yu Can't Concentrate": Attention Deficit Disorder in The Story of the Stone

^ "Why Bao-yu Can't Concentrate": Attention Deficit Disorder in The Story of the Stone Dore J. Levy The Story of the Stone, by Cao Xueqin (17157-1763), is the premier social novel of China.1 Nothing in the tradition compares with it in critical or popular appeal. In China it has generated its own subgenre of literary criticism, hongxue ("Dream of the Red Chamber Studies," after the novel's alternate title, The Dream of the Red Chamber—Honglou meng). A mammoth narrative in 120 chapters, it achieves what Chinese literary tradition has always considered the ultimate aesthetic goal for any genre: to evoke Chinese history and culture on every level, in subject matter, language, and structure. On one level, the novel is an allegory of romantic love and spiritual transcendence, but it is also a highly realistic document of the life of the Chinese nobility in the eighteenth century, a fountain of information on social customs, family structure, even literary taste and objets d'art.2 The Story of the Stone centers on the aristocratic Jia family as a microcosm of the empire under foreign—Manchu—dominion. The Jias' status comes from the achievements of two glorious ancestors, but succeeding generations of males have become increasingly inadequate, and their fortunes are definitely in decline. Following their gradual decent, the novel sweeps from environments of unimaginable wealth, privilege, and refinement to the dregs and extremities of Chinese society during the heyday of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Chinese critics have studied The Story of the Stone to repossess a past that even the author's contemporary commentators lamented was slipping away. To add to its interest, the novel is also explicitly a roman à clef, whose main character, Bao-yu, is widely regarded as an autobiographical composite of Cao Xueqin and at least one of his close relatives.3 In Chinese literary criticism, reading a work as a manifestation of Literature and Mediane 13, no. 2 (Fall 1994) 255-273 © 1994 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 256 ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER IN THE STORY OF THE STONE an author's intent, or zhi, is commonplace. By extension, any literary artifact is in a sense an autobiographical document.4 Any analysis of the hero, therefore, may have direct implications for the biography of his creator—at least in the minds of Chinese critics. Because Bao-yu's characterization is so richly detailed, it invites analysis of his—and his creator's—most intimate being. In his introduction to the complete translation of The Story of the Stone, David Hawkes notes: "Bao-yu is an almost clinical picture of the kind of child whom old ladies refer to in lowered voices as 'a very strange little boy'"5 The clinical picture can now be recognized as that of Attention Deficit Disorder, popularly known as A.D.D. The novel's copious and precise detail of Bao-yu's life from approximately age nine to nineteen makes it possible to "question " the hero. He meets all the diagnostic criteria for A.D.D. in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and conforms to many other less canonical descriptions as well.6 The validity of such a "diagnosis" aside, the correspondence between what we know of Bao-yu and the characteristics of people diagnosed with A.D.D. is compelling because the disorder makes sense of so many otherwise baffling aspects of Bao-yu's character. It is not my intention to reduce The Story of the Stone to a clinical curiosity. If Bao-yu "has" A.D.D., it does not explain everything in the book, nor does it detract from the vast sea of social, historical, and psychological interpretations of the novel. The possibility of this common neurological disorder is only a facet of Bao-yu's character, albeit a very significant one. The beauty of the diagnosis is that it makes Baoyu 's character, and his characterization, consistent rather than capricious . Attention Deficit Disorder was first described by George F. Still in 1902, but only within the last two decades has it risen to the notice of the general public. Still was the first person to...