A Dream of the Red Chamber, Denying the Death of the Novel, and Our Dwindling Attention Spans

Red, White, Brown by Rothko

Over at The Millions, Dylan Suher lays out a lovely tribute to Xueqin’s A Dream of the Red Chamber–one of the four greatest Chinese epics works. I have to admit that though Chris and I have read parts of all of them, and though we have three of the four works sitting on our bookshelves, we have yet to read them in full. When I say epic work, you probably think of War and Peace, right? Well, these are volumes long and sometimes each volume is War and Peace-sized.  And like Suher admits, Red Chamber is very different than our Western novels. The Chinese classic writers seem to be just as absorbed by ritual and minutae as they were by plot. Sometimes more so. It’s a radically different way of writing, with value placed on stillness rather than motion, and as an impatient, MTV Generation Westerner I find myself often intimidated by it.

But I love what Suher says here about the so-called death of the novel, and why Red Chamber might teach us something very valuable in our fast-moving society:

Myriad and ever-emerging like cockroaches, those essays that would pronounce a final sentence on the novel rely on a gross misperception of how culture works. The logic behind most of these arguments is that readers are only willing to read works that reflect their direct experience; thus, a faster paced world demands shorter stories, or an image-obsessed world eschews text altogether. “Death of the novel” essayists would condemn the art form to the dustbin of history like the telegraph, the typewriter or some other piece of outdated machinery.  Theirs is a brutally determinist view of the world; they seem to believe that culture can only reflect–and never influence–the societies and people that produce it.

However, that’s never been my experience. I have continually been shaped by books. To Kill A Mockingbird taught me what courage is. Beowulf taught me about death. Swann’s Way taught me how to let go of love. And I hope that Dream of the Red Chamber will teach me to pay attention. For as much as life is made out of Joycean epiphanies, it seems that a great deal more of it is composed of lunches and dinners, awful parties, boring family get-togethers, and countless, idly-watched episodes of Law and Order. There seems to be a great deal of value in learning how to find the beauty that lies in this “wasted” time. Not to say that we can’t also have quick beach reads. But we don’t only read to consume; we also read in order to learn and maybe even in order to change and to grow.

Read the rest here.