Cao Xueqin and Chekhov's Gun

Modernism before Modernism was a thing

Cao Xueqin and Chekhov's Gun

Anton Chekhov (Антон Чехов) is often credited with spreading the idea that everything in a play (or story) ought to be there for some reason. This is known as Chekhov’s gun: if you introduce a gun, you’d better use it at some point in time.

Now, does this have to happen in fiction? Of course not. It would be ridiculous to have every single character and every single event play some sort of deliberate symbolic role. This reminds me a lot of the sort of pro-Communist literature Mao Zedong encouraged during the Yan’an days: literature that is overly symbolic and political, to the point of being impossible to read.

But Chekhov was right. And it seems that Cao Xueqin beat him to the punch.