The Chapter 5 Poems
We’re just about done with the massive chapter 5.
Chapter 5 is the most difficult chapter of Dream of the Red Chamber. It’s basically the novel’s litmus test.
If you can finish chapter 5, there’s an extremely good chance that you’ll finish the entire book. It’s not that there are no poems for the rest of the book. Actually, the book is filled with poetry. It’s that you don’t see as many extremely abstract and disconnected poems elsewhere.
The most difficult part of these poems is that many of them refer to characters that haven’t been introduced yet. In fact, one of the characters referred to here hasn’t been born yet.
The earlier poems in chapter 5 — the ones Jia Baoyu saw in an illustrated book — go together with the lengthy collection of “songs” that we just read. However, if you try to line them up one for one you’ll run into problems. David Hawkes implies in the appendix to volume 1 of The Story of the Stone that everything lines up nicely and naturally, which simply isn’t the case. For example, both the first and second song are clearly about both Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai; however, only one of the poem and painting sets are about the two girls.
We’ll come back to these poems as we continue through the book. Chapter 5 isn’t exactly a blueprint for the rest of the book. However, as the story unfolds the meaning of these poems will become a lot clearer.
Similarly, you can look at the ending of Dream of the Red Chamber in light of these poems. This is a popular hobby among “Redologists,” or people whose academic studies are focused on Dream of the Red Chamber. However, I want to wait until we’ve translated the book as originally published before playing that game. One problem many Western scholars (including David Hawkes) have is the desire to jump straight into the textual criticism without figuring out what the text actually says first.