The Story of Stone: Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone Symbolism of 'Dream of the Red Chamber,' 'Water Margin,' and 'The Journey to the West.'.

• Author: Idema, Wilt

Stone and jade play a central role in the symbolism of the Dream of the Red Chamber (hereafter Dream). While stone imagery also occurs in the two other novels mentioned in the title of the book under review, it certainly does not hold the same position: "it functions marginally in one narrative and remains a decorative frame device in the other" (p. 98). As a result, this monograph, while devoting a chapter each to The Journey to the West (chapter five) and to Water Margin (chapter six), is primarily concerned with Ts'ao Hsueh-ch'in's composition. A booklength inquiry into the fascinating topic of stone and jade is indeed a welcome addition to the critical literature on this inexhaustible novel. The author demonstrates the multi-layered, double-nature of the symbolism involved in stone and jade. The result is a convincing proof that, despite the quantity of writing already engendered by "Red-ology," it is still possible to come up with interesting and stimulating new insights.

Following a very long second chapter on ancient Chinese stone lore, couched sometimes in rather rebarbative jargon, the discussion of the symbolism of stone and jade as operative in Dream really gets underway in chapter three. Professor Wang argues that the imagery of stone is mainly operative on a metaphysical level, where binary oppositions are mutually transformative and non-evaluative, whereas the jade symbolism is mainly operative in the moral realm, in which the contrasting terms in binary pairs "enter into confrontational rather than complementary relationships with each other" (p. 139). She goes on to argue that characters in the novel who have the element yu ("jade") in their name and who are distinguished by their obsessive pursuit of purity (i.e., Pao-yu, Tai-yu, and the nun Miao-yu) clearly enjoy more of the narrator's sympathy than do more sociable characters, such as Hsueh Pao-ch'ai. However, as our author also notices the association between jade and the ideal virtues of the Confucian gentleman, she is struck by the "contradiction between the anti-Confucian worldview constructed by Pao-yu and his identification with a symbol that contains within itself an ideological discourse that is predominantly Confucian" (p. 121).

The contrastive evaluation of Lin Tai-yu and Hsueh Pao-ch'ai is of course an old pastime in Dream criticism. As Wang pursues her case against the hapless Pao-yu, she grows more and more strident in tone. At first we are told (p. 124) that "the narrator's sympathy tilts towards Lin Tai-yu," but later we learn that Pao-ch'ai is perceived as a moral being far inferior to Tai-yu" (p. 135), and that "the value of a human being, for the narrator of the Dream, lies unambiguously in individuality" (p. 136). And when Hsueh Pao-ch'ai, "a mere public self" (p. 135), tries to comfort her aunt, who is distraught over the suicide of a female servant, she is accused by our...