Calligraphy
My latest YouTube creation is a brief overview of the wonderful world of Chinese calligraphy, with an emphasis on the famous “cursive style” (草書) that I’ve always found intimidating.
Chinese calligraphy is really an uniquely formidable art form to dive into, particularly if you are a foreigner. The rules and conventions of artistic rendering of Chinese characters have been laid down over centuries of practice and tradition. What’s worse, as I explain in the video, is that the only real way to get a feel for what is powerful and what is ordinary is to spend time writing it yourself.
Now, there aren’t really a ton of references to the art of actually composing calligraphy in Dream of the Red Chamber. The closest we’ve seen in the opening chapters is probably this segment from chapter 8:
一面說，一面來至自己臥室，只見筆墨在案。晴雯先接出來，笑道：「好啊，叫我研了墨，早起高興，只寫了三個字，扔下筆就走了，哄我等了這一天。快來給我寫完了這些墨才算呢！」寶玉方想起早起的事來，因笑道：「我寫的那三個字在那裡呢？」晴雯笑道：「這個人可醉了。你頭裡過那府裡去，囑咐我貼在門斗兒上的。我恐怕別人貼壞了，親自爬高上梯，貼了半天，這會子還凍的手僵著呢！」寶玉笑道：「我忘了你手冷，我替你握著。」便伸手拉著晴雯的手，同看門斗上新寫的三個字。
一時，黛玉來了。寶玉笑道：「好妹妹，你別撒謊，你看這三個字，那一個好？」黛玉仰頭看見是「絳芸軒」三字，笑道：「個個都好。怎麼寫的這樣好了！明兒也替我寫個匾。」寶玉笑道：「你又哄我了。」
As Jia Baoyu said this, he went to his bedroom where he saw writing brushes and ink laid out on his desk.
Qingwen greeted him as soon as he walked in. “Okay,” she said with a smile, “you had me prepare the ink this morning, you eagerly wrote three characters, and then you tossed the brush aside and left. I’ve been waiting for you this entire day! You’d better use up every drop of this ink now!”
Only then did Baoyu remember what he had done that morning. “Where are those three chracters I wrote?” he asked with a smile.
“You must be drunk!” replied Qingwen, still smiling. “Before you went to the Ningguo Mansion you ordered me to paste them on the door frame. I was afraid that another person would do it wrong, and so I went up the ladder myself and spent a lot of time sticking it up. My hands are still stiff from the cold!”
“I forgot your hands were cold,” said Baoyu with a smile. “Let me warm them for you.”
He reached out and took Qingwen’s hands in his, and they then looked up together at the three newly written characters on top of the frame of the door.
Daiyu arrived before long. “Dear Daiyu,” said Baoyu to her, “please don’t make fun of me. Please tell me which one of those three characters you like the best.”
Daiyu looked up and saw the characters. They said “Crimson Rue Studio.”
“They’re all excellent!” she said with a smile. “How is your calligraphy so good? You really should write a plaque like that for me one day.”
“You’re flattering me again,” said Baoyu with a smile.
Now, as you can clearly see in the passage above, there’s not a whole lot of discussion here about what Jia Baoyu’s calligraphy looks like, or why in the world his rendition of “絳芸軒” looked so nice.
But the fascinating thing here is that the calligraphy itself was designed and used to be an integral part of daily life. In other words, Jia Baoyu wasn’t creating a piece of writing in the hopes of sticking it behind glass in a museum one day. Calligraphy seems to have been a basic and fundamental part of everyday life for him, something that he would interact with on an almost casual basis.
I’m not convinced that this is an accurate reflection of the role calligraphy played in even upper class Chinese daily life in the 18th century. However, I do think Cao Xueqin deliberately decided to have calligraphy, poetry, and the arts play such a fundamental role in the lives of his characters.
You really can’t separate those arts from the literature that is Dream of the Red Chamber. They go hand in hand.