Journey to the West, or The Monkey King, is a late Ming, fictitious creation based on the journey of the historical figure Xuanzang (602-664CE) to India during the Tang dynasty (618-907CE). At the time, Xuanzang was a monk at Jingtu Temple in the capital of Chang'an. Disheartened by social corruption and the poor quality of translations of Buddhist scriptures, Xuanzang took it upon himself to travel to India to learn the doctrine directly and eventually provide superior replacements for the flawed Chinese canon. With the Emperor's blessing and the help of other Buddhists, Xuanzang made the treacherous journey across the barren deserts and steppes of central and western China. His journey lasted 17 years, from 629-647CE, during which he faced numerous hardships, visited important religious sites in India and studied at the ancient Indian university at Nalanda.
Popular stories of Xuanzang's travels cropped up during the Song and Yuan dynasties (960-1368CE). Finally, at the end of the Ming (1368-1644CE), novelist and poet Wu Cheng'en (~1500-58CE) combined all these legends, adding to them his own allegorical, literary and political sensibilities to form a summa of the legends about Xuanzang's journey. Like the other great novels of the late Ming and high Qing, Wu's work was a daring linguistic project, taking up the vernacular instead of the classical language to tell his story. For centuries, in fact, the authorship of the text was in doubt because its author elected to remain anonymous in order to avoid censure for having written in dialect. Journey to the West, like Dream of the Red Chamber, is a work not only read for its surface narratives but for the political and religious meanings that subtend it.
Wu's story contains 100 chapters that recount the perilous journeyings of Tripitaka (Xuanzang) and his four spectacular companions/gaurdians (Monkey, Piggie, Sandy and Dragon) in the episodic manner of Arthurian legend. Assaulted by ghosts, goblins, beasts, often trials programmatically arranged by the gods, the pilgrims are in constant danger but always miraculously pull through. In the end, Tripitaka makes it to India and receives the Buddhist scriptures from the living Buddha atop Vulture Peak.
Readings:
Journey to the West (see ANGEL)
Questions:
(1) How do you see the Monkey King functioning in the story?
(2) Where are there passages where soci0-religious criticisms may be being made?
(3) How is the tale an allegory for the human soul?
Secondary references:
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Showing posts with label Making Lyrical Lives Prosaic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Making Lyrical Lives Prosaic. Show all posts
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Palace Politics
The Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as The Story of the Stone, written by Cao Xueqing in the 18th century, is one of the "Four Great Qing Novels." In fact, it is considered the most important of the four and the culmination of classical Chinese novels. Princeton sinologist Andrew H. Plaks encapsulates the importance and universal scope of the work:
"Nearly all readers of the Dream of the Red Chamber--both native and foreign--come away with the impression that what they have experienced in the lengthy span from cover to cover is a comprehensive view of the entire civilization of the Imperial China. This sense of cultural completeness may be largely attributed to the simple fact that the novel presents at exceedingly close range the day-to-day life of a bygone age of glory--and there is little doubt that this aspect is responsible for the degree of emotional attachment with which the work has been treasured by two centuries of readers." (11)
Cao's work is unique in its sheer bredth, taking in the whole sweep of Chinese history, mythology, religion and arts. Having written the novel in the vernacular Beijing dialect, Cao also used the work to legitimize linguistic forms of literary expression other than Classical Chinese, used almost exclusively in the practice of the high literary arts.
The novel records the daily lives of important members of the Rongguo and Ningguo Houses of the Jia Clan, one of the most illustrious clans at court at the time. The history of the fall of these houses follows the narrower narrations of the lives of over thirty main characters and four hundred minor ones. Jia Baoyu, a precious Genji like boy, is the heir of his family and the main character of the novel. His emotional entanglement in love affairs and the mythic nature of his birth and end provide some of the novel's most poignant and engaging episodes.
Like the great works of the Western literary tradition (e.g. the Commedia, The Canterbury Tales, the Quixote, etc.), The Dream of the Red Chamber has accumulated centuries of commentaries and criticisms. The study of the novel in fact has its own designation called "Redology." Four schools of criticism have grown up around it and have debated insoluble historical and literary cruxes for centuries. Important themes that have occupied and intrigued researchers and readers have been the novel's autobiographical, social, archetypal and politically allegorical elements. In reading some passages from the novel, we will focus on some of the social and archetypal aspects of the text.
Readings:
Dream of the Red Chamber (see ANGEL)
Questions:
(1) What are some of the mythic and religious elements informing the story?
(2) How do these elements seem to function in the convoluted realities of this prestigious clan?
(3) What do we learn about social relations between classes and genders during the Qing from in this text?
(4) What some to be some of the inherent tensions between fiction and history in the tale?
Secondary references:
*Plaks, Andrew H. Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.
* Xiao Chi. The Chinese Garden as Lyric Enclave: A Generic Study of The Story of the Stone. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001.
*Alexander des Forges, "From Source Texts to 'Reality Observed:' The Creation of the Author in 19th Century Chinese Vernacular Fiction," CLEAR 22 (Dec. 2000): 67-84.
"Nearly all readers of the Dream of the Red Chamber--both native and foreign--come away with the impression that what they have experienced in the lengthy span from cover to cover is a comprehensive view of the entire civilization of the Imperial China. This sense of cultural completeness may be largely attributed to the simple fact that the novel presents at exceedingly close range the day-to-day life of a bygone age of glory--and there is little doubt that this aspect is responsible for the degree of emotional attachment with which the work has been treasured by two centuries of readers." (11)
Cao's work is unique in its sheer bredth, taking in the whole sweep of Chinese history, mythology, religion and arts. Having written the novel in the vernacular Beijing dialect, Cao also used the work to legitimize linguistic forms of literary expression other than Classical Chinese, used almost exclusively in the practice of the high literary arts.
The novel records the daily lives of important members of the Rongguo and Ningguo Houses of the Jia Clan, one of the most illustrious clans at court at the time. The history of the fall of these houses follows the narrower narrations of the lives of over thirty main characters and four hundred minor ones. Jia Baoyu, a precious Genji like boy, is the heir of his family and the main character of the novel. His emotional entanglement in love affairs and the mythic nature of his birth and end provide some of the novel's most poignant and engaging episodes.
Like the great works of the Western literary tradition (e.g. the Commedia, The Canterbury Tales, the Quixote, etc.), The Dream of the Red Chamber has accumulated centuries of commentaries and criticisms. The study of the novel in fact has its own designation called "Redology." Four schools of criticism have grown up around it and have debated insoluble historical and literary cruxes for centuries. Important themes that have occupied and intrigued researchers and readers have been the novel's autobiographical, social, archetypal and politically allegorical elements. In reading some passages from the novel, we will focus on some of the social and archetypal aspects of the text.
Readings:
Dream of the Red Chamber (see ANGEL)
Questions:
(1) What are some of the mythic and religious elements informing the story?
(2) How do these elements seem to function in the convoluted realities of this prestigious clan?
(3) What do we learn about social relations between classes and genders during the Qing from in this text?
(4) What some to be some of the inherent tensions between fiction and history in the tale?
Secondary references:
*Plaks, Andrew H. Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.
* Xiao Chi. The Chinese Garden as Lyric Enclave: A Generic Study of The Story of the Stone. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001.
*Alexander des Forges, "From Source Texts to 'Reality Observed:' The Creation of the Author in 19th Century Chinese Vernacular Fiction," CLEAR 22 (Dec. 2000): 67-84.
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