Why Jia Baoyu Hated The Painting
It's not just rebellion against learning
Why Jia Baoyu Hated The Painting
Yesterday’s section had a lot of stuff going on. I want to focus, though, on the part at the end of the section:
當下秦氏引了一簇人來至上房內間，寶玉抬頭看見是一幅畫貼在上面，人物固好，其故事乃是「燃藜圖」，心中便有些不快。又有一副對聯，寫的是：「世事洞明皆學問，人情練達即文章。」及看了這兩句，縱然室宇精美，鋪陳華麗，亦斷斷不肯在這裡了，忙說：「快出去！快出去！」
Lady Qin took them into the inner chambers of the main building. When Baoyu looked up, he saw a painting mounted on the wall. It was The Picture of Burning the Goosefoot – an excellent rendition of the subject, the Han dynasty scholar Liu Xiang, studying by candlelight. At once, Baoyu felt upset.
On the sides of the painting was this poem:
Clearly understanding the ways of the world is true learning;
Fully mastering human affairs is true literature.
Despite the exquisite furnishings and lavish adornments of the room, Baoyu refused to stay a moment longer after reading those two lines. “Out now!” he shouted.
This is the first of a large number of poems in chapter 5.
The first thing you’ve got to keep in mind is that poems in Dream of the Red Chamber actually matter. These aren’t ornate throw-away poems designed to get a chuckle out of the reader. These are the heart of the story itself, which means that we really need to pay attention when we come across one of them.
The second thing to remember is that the poems tell us something about the characters and who they really are. In this case, this particular poem is so offensive and upsetting to Jia Baoyu that he demands to be taken out of the room at once.
The title Picture of Burning the Goosefoot (燃藜圖) refers specifically to the Han Dynasty scholar Liu Xiang. Legend has it that Liu Xiang was taught esoteric knowledge by a mysterious old man, later revealed to be the God of Fire (炎帝), as he worked gathering old text in the Tianlu Pavillion. In the end, the verb 燃藜 meant to burn the midnight oil or to study intently, and became a powerful symbol of the devotion to scholarship that is central to Confucian thought.
But it’s not that Jia Baoyu is rejecting learning and scholarship outright. Rather, it’s the practical or utilitarian type of knowledge that he’s upset with. In other words, Jia Baoyu finds the Confucian aspect of this painting upsetting.
This will become obvious as we work through the story. Jia Baoyu isn’t a fool. He’s actually a very intelligent young man with a lot of literary gifts. His problem is not with learning itself, but, rather, with the culture of learning in the society around him — and his biggest frustration is that he’s being forced to adapt his natural style to the culture he is surrounded by.
Do you remember Jia Yucun’s long list of people with a combination of good and evil spirits, people who were bound to become eccentrics that stand out from society in general? If you’ve forgotten, you can go back and read this post again:
Jia Baoyu is clearly one of those people — the sort that simply does not fit into the society around him. And that’s why the poem frustrates him so much.
Now, the poem itself is interesting — and it’s not really hard to understand.
The first line, 世事洞明皆學問, means that fully comprehending the things of the world is how you become learned. 世事 means the things of the world; 洞明 means to fully comprehend or deeply understand; 皆 means “all;” and 學問 means learning, knowledge, erudition, and so forth. I stuck in “true” before “learning” in my translation to emphasize the feeling that this is the way to become wise.
The second line is a little bit harder, but it’s not too bad: 人情練達即文章. 人情 means human emotions or human feelings; we’ve run into 情 several times now, and that magic word will keep coming up. 文章 means an “article” (i.e. for a magazine or newspaper) in modern Chinese, but it probably refers to literature in general in this context. 即 conveys this sense of “only then,” as in “only if you do X will you get Y.”
The hard part is 練達, which is a verb here. It means something similar to 洞明: to fully grasp or fully understand. This definition from Taiwan’s Ministry of Education is probably the best, and it quotes this specific example..
In other words, you only can create literature (i.e. true literature) if you fully understand human emotions.
So why would Jia Baoyu feel upset with this? We’ve already seen that he’s one of the characters in this book that is filled to the brim with 情, and we’ll see before long that he’s also quite learned.
Well, there are two things that Jia Baoyu doesn’t like about this poem:
The first line basically means that social climbing is the way to truly be cultivated. 世事, or the things of the world, heavily implies social structures and heirarchies. These are things that Jia Baoyu naturally rejects; in fact, his insistance on treating everybody around him as equals made Lin Daiyu upset with him earlier in yesterday’s translation segment. 世事洞明 is the opposite of what Jia Baoyu wants to do. He’d rather get away from the “ways of the world” and live a life of free artistic creation.
The idea of 練達 in the second line gives a little bit of a feeling of emotional manipulation. Or, in other words, the key to creating literature is not to express your own emotion, but, rather, to figure out how to play with the emotions of others. That seems to be what Jia Baoyu is so upset about.
It probably seems like I’m splitting hairs here. In fact, I think you have to be careful with this to make sense of what’s going on.
Fortunately, though, others agree with me.
David Hawkes translated the poem like this:
I don’t think his first line is accurate. It’s not “human activities” that you need an insight into. Rather, it’s human social structures, which are the very things that Baoyu detests.
Meanwhile, the Yangs translate the poem like this:
I strongly disagree with their translation. 洞明 in the first line means to fully master, not to just have a grasp on something. And 人情 in the second line is clearly human emotions, not “worldly wisdom.”
It’s important to get this sort of thing right, even though it might feel like a nitpick. If we want to understand what is going on, we’ve got to figure out what it says first.