Cao Xueqin Writing Style

Cao Xueqin's writing style is domestic realism organised by rank. A scene carries its meaning in procedure: where a person sits, who is served first, which door they came in by, and what they are allowed to call each other. In chapter three of Dream of the Red Chamber, the orphaned Lin Daiyu arrives at the Rongguo mansion and is pressed to sit on the couch. She notices two embroidered cushions placed facing each other, she "thought of the gradation of seats," in Bencraft Joly's 1892 translation, and she takes a chair by the east wall instead. The household has been explained to neither of you. You have both worked it out from a cushion.

The size of the book is the craft problem, and it is why the method matters. Chapter six sends a poor country relation called Grannie Liu to the same gates to beg. She cannot make herself walk past the marble lions at the main entrance, so she squats by the side gate, and when she finally reaches the back street a boy wants to know which Mrs Zhou she means, because the compound holds three of them, plus two young married women of the same name. Pedlars work that back street. A list of characters would have told you the household was enormous. The boy's question makes you feel it, and it costs one line of dialogue.

Underneath the procedure is a rule about faces. People in this book spend their days deciding what they are allowed to have noticed. Baoyu, meeting Daiyu for the first time in chapter three, asks her out of nowhere whether she has a jade, to the discomfiture, Joly writes, of all who could not make out what he meant. Daiyu reasons in her own head that he asks because he has one himself, and she says no. Charles Baxter, in The Art of Subtext, calls this territory the segmented face, where a single feature caught at the right angle carries everything unsaid. Cao Xueqin works a layer out from there. He gives you the inference itself, inside the character's head, and then the row of people in the room who did not follow it.

Two things make him worth a week of a novelist's attention. Rank still runs most rooms, and few novels write it out. Sol Stein's instruction in Stein on Writing was to foreground the background, and this novel does that at full length, delivering a family's history as housekeeping: seating plans, monthly allowances, gifts with the provenance attached, and the order in which three women put a meal on the table. Write the housekeeping and the family history arrives on its own.

The declined seat

A courtesy in this novel is offered, refused, and offered again, and the number of rounds measures the gap between the two people. The rule itself goes unspoken. Daiyu is pressed towards the stove-couch and takes a chair. Her aunt presses her to the east side, she guesses the seat is her uncle's and takes a chair again, and in the end she is pressed onto the couch anyway. At dinner Xifeng steers her to the foremost chair on the left and she keeps declining until Grandmother Jia rules that a guest may properly sit there. The rounds are the measurement, and Joly's chapter three contains three of them.

The door you may not use

Grannie Liu, with a small grandson in tow, gets as far as the marble lions at the front entrance and stops there. Sedan chairs and horses crowd it. She squats by the side gate instead. The servants lounging there look her over, refuse to answer her, and send her off to wait by a wall until the real visitors have gone, and then one older man among them takes pity and points her round to a back street. Access is characterisation, and it moves faster than any description of poverty. Wharton uses the same instrument on Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, where the rooms Lily stops being invited into measure her fall. Decide which doors each character may use before you decide how they talk.

Naming rights

Who may call whom what is a live question on every page. Baoyu, on being introduced to his new cousin, invents a courtesy name for her on the spot, built on the way her eyebrows draw together, and his cousin Tanchun asks at once which of the standard books that came out of. Grannie Liu, three chapters later, keeps calling her own son-in-law the great lady's nephew, and a servant has to explain on the way out that the household already has a nephew and he is somebody else. A boy of rank may issue a name and be teased about his sources. A poor woman may not use a kinship term at all. Give your hierarchy a vocabulary, then let somebody use the wrong word where it can be overheard.

The servant relay

Information in this house travels through the people who carry the trays. Grannie Liu does not get to state her business to anybody who could grant it. She is passed from the servants at the front gate to an older man among them, from him to a boy loitering in the back street, from the boy to the wife of a household attendant named Zhou Rui, and only then into the room where the money is. Zhou Rui himself is away south. Four handoffs before the request itself is spoken. The relay solves the problem every ensemble novel has, which is how a fact reaches a character who was not present, and it solves it without a coincidence. Staff your household properly and you can stop relying on overheard confessions.

The object that acquires a claim

Baoyu wears an inscribed jade. Baochai wears a gold necklet with matching lines on it. In chapter eight Baochai reads his inscription aloud, her maid Ying'er remarks that the two appear to pair, and Baochai's response is to send the girl for tea and tell Baoyu her necklet has no characters on it. Nothing has happened in the plot. The girl is sent out of the room. A claim has been made, denied, and pinned in the reader's mind by the denial, and it hangs over the rest of the book. Objects work like this when a third party voices what the owner cannot, so give the sentence to the maid.

The version the house agrees on

When Baoyu learns that Daiyu has no jade, he throws his own on the floor and the servants scramble for it. Grandmother Jia then produces an explanation in about four sentences: the girl did have one, her dying mother took it into the grave with her, and Daiyu was being modest. The explanation is invented on the spot and it holds, because of who said it. Baoyu, in Joly's phrase, could not even then advance any further arguments, and a waiting-maid hands the stone back for his grandmother to fasten on him herself. Decide who in your book has the authority to close a subject.

The stone frame

The novel opens outside itself. The goddess Nuwa prepares 36,501 blocks of stone to patch the sky and uses 36,500, and the block left over is polished, shrunk to the size of a fan pendant, inscribed by a Buddhist monk and promised a place in a family of rank, and the book you are reading claims to be the record written on that stone. A monk and a Taoist priest find it lamenting. Cao Xueqin keeps the device running afterwards. Read chapter one and chapter eight together and you can watch one device used twice, once to start a book and once to defend a detail inside it. In chapter eight the narration breaks off to admit that the jade has been drawn a little larger than life so a reader can make out the inscription by lamplight, which heads off the objection that no newborn's mouth could have held such a thing.

Names that argue with the realism

Chapter one says out loud that the author "designedly concealed the true circumstances" and borrowed the attributes of perception and spirituality to tell the story, and it glosses one of its own names, Zhen Shiyin, as "truth under the garb of fiction" in Joly's rendering. A second name, Jia Yucun, is introduced in the same breath as a device of the same kind, so the realism is labelled as construction before a single room has been described. Cervantes does something comparable by crediting Don Quixote to a manuscript by Cide Hamete Benengeli and keeping a straight face about a book he invented. Then notice how little Cao Xueqin does with the trick. He states it once and writes the household for eighty chapters as though he had forgotten it.

The announced ending

Chapter five sends Baoyu's spirit into the Great Void, where a fairy lays out the fates of the girls of the household in a set of ballads. There are twelve of them. The outcomes are on the table before the reader has met most of the people they belong to. That decision costs him surprise and buys him something better suited to a book of this length, which is that every ordinary afternoon in the garden reads as part of a decline the reader can already see coming. Suspense shifts from what will happen to how these people will meet it. If you are writing something long, consider telling the reader the ending early and making the manner of arrival the question.

Contrasts that repeat down the ranks

Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai arrive within two chapters of each other, one motherless and quick-tempered, the other settled and correct, and the household spends the book measuring them against each other. That much is ordinary novel-building. The unusual part is that the same contrast runs again lower down, where the identical liberty carries a different price. Grandmother Jia can hand Xifeng a nickname to her face, which Joly renders as vixen, and it lands as affection, while Grannie Liu ventures one coarse proverb in the same house and the servant beside her winks furiously for her to stop. Same liberty, opposite standing, and a reader who now knows the exchange rate. Build your contrasts in columns as well as in pairs.

Reducing a big cast to one label each

The sensible-looking answer to a cast this size is one trait and one tag line per person, so the reader can keep them apart. It holds for a chapter and then the book goes flat, because a labelled character cannot surprise anybody, and the whole method depends on people behaving differently as the room changes around them. Cao Xueqin keeps his cast legible through fixed positions, not fixed personalities. Xifeng's position is that she runs the household, and you can hear it in what she says to a newly arrived orphan: five questions in a row without waiting for answers, an offer to supply anything the girl wants to eat, and an instruction to report any maid or matron who fails in her duties. Assign functions and let the behaviour move.

Writing indirection as vagueness

Copy the politeness and you get dialogue in which each speaker hints, both parties sound charming, and nothing whatever is at stake. The indirection here is precise, because the code is public and both parties know what a formula permits. When Grandmother Jia tells Xifeng to drop at once any allusion to her former remarks, that is an order, the room hears it as an order, and Xifeng obeys inside the same breath. Vagueness has no known value. A hint bites only once the reader has been taught the rule it bends, so teach the rule in a scene where little is riding on it, and bend it later when a great deal is.

Bolting on a frame that changes nothing

A stone, a dream, a found manuscript, a narrator who admits the whole thing is a copy. The frame is the part of this novel that is easiest to imitate and easiest to waste. Mario Vargas Llosa, whose Letters to a Young Novelist sets out the test, asks whether the nested story and the story containing it modify each other, or whether the inner one merely sits inside the outer, which he calls collage. Cao Xueqin's frame passes, because a family congratulating itself on its own permanence is being reported by an object that was surplus to a repair job. Ask what your frame makes false. If the answer is nothing, cut it.

Glossing your own code for the reader

The moment the narration stops to explain what a gesture means, the gesture stops working, because the reader has nothing left to decode. Cao Xueqin leaves the gradation of seats unexplained. Daiyu thinks of it, acts on it, and the sentence moves on. He does hand over a genealogy once, in chapter two, and it is worth seeing how: two men who have both lost their posts sit drinking in a village inn, and one of them dilates on the Rongguo mansion for the other's benefit. The family tree arrives as gossip between strangers, in a voice that is not the author's, and the reader gets to eavesdrop. If you catch yourself writing a clause that begins with which meant that, cut it and give the information to somebody with a reason to be telling it.