Jia Yucun Misses The Point

How we know he was talking nonsense

Jia Yucun Misses The Point

First thing’s first: look for some changes coming to the structure of this blog and to my posts in the near future. You might not have noticed this yet, but I now have a YouTube channel devoted to this project. I’ve also created a page for characters in the book, which I’m slowly updating. After a few days, everything should be much more reader friendly. Thank you for your patience!

In the near future, look for more reader-friendly guides, including in-depth chapter summaries and, for paying subscribers, complete chapter translations in English for the sections we’ve already covered.

As always, I recommend starting here, though you can naturally go through the posts and sections in whichever order you like.

First of all, I want to congratulate you if you made it through yesterday’s post. We’ve mentioned a number of times that Cao Xueqin deliberately included elements in his writing that would subvert his readers’ expectations for a variety of reasons. The monologue by Jia Yucun is one of those really rich and fascinating pieces of Dream of the Red Chamber that simply gets lost in translation unless we slow down and talk about it.

There are three approaches I’m going to take to explaining Jia Yucun’s rhetoric.

First, let’s talk about his choice of words.

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Jia Yucun’s Classical Chinese Rhetoric

This is the part that doesn’t come across if you read it in translation. David Hawkes did his best to try to emulate this, but it’s simply not the same.

Jia Yucun uses grammar in his monologue that comes straight out of philosophic classical Chinese texts. Take a phrase like this, for example:

若大仁者，則應運而生；大惡者，則應劫而生。運生世治，劫生世危。

Some of this is pretty easy to figure out. 若 means “if,” and it’s implied in the second clause. You’ve got to remember that classical Chinese rhetoric was all about parallel phrases and implied characters.

The 若…則 pattern is a classical Chinese “if… then” pattern. Of course, nobody talks like this. Nobody in the 18th century would have talked like this. It’s stilted Chinese better suited for texts from the BC era than to represent a conversation between two old friends, which is what we have here.

者 is one of the “之乎者也” particles, and is used to turn something into a noun, usually representing a person. 大仁 here is something like “virtue,” so 大仁者 is “a virtuous person.” 大惡 is “evil,” so 大惡者 is “an evil person.”

The 應運而生 and 應劫而生 patterns are similar. 生 means to be born; 應 basically means “from” (similar to something like 由 or 於 in classical Chinese, or, in modern Chinese, 從), and 而 is one of those tricky connecting particles you see all the time in classical Chinese. 運 is good luck (運氣 means “luck” in modern Chinese), and 劫 is a character we’ve seen before: it means “bad luck” here.

運生世治，劫生世危 is a similarly stilted and formulaic statement. 世 means the world, 生 still means to be born, 治 is to rule or control, and 危 means danger. When things are born from auspiciousness, the world is controlled; when they are born from inauspiciousness, the world is chaotic.

Now, take a look at the thought process it took to decipher those two simple statements. Apply that to the entire long monologue, and you’ll get an idea of what Jia Yucun’s logic is like.

Jia Yucun’s speech here isn’t actual speech. It’s a route list, almost like he memorized something from a textbook and was spewing it forth. And remember: he’s meeting with Leng Zixing in a tavern. He’s not giving a lecture.

It’s absolutely true that Jia Yucun is hoping that his rhetoric will add some weight to the nonsense he’s talking about. However, you and I are smarter than that. We can see through his nonsense by patiently considering it.

And that’s the second approach: dissecting Jia Yucun’s logic.

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Jia Yucun’s Poor Logic