| Since the 19th century, Honglou meng (known in English as Dream of the Red Chamber, A Dream of Red Mansions, or The Story of the Stone), the great 18th-century Chinese novel by Cao Xueqin (1715–1763 or 1764) (and Gao E [1738?–1815?]), has been predominantly received as a tragic work. Through detailed analysis, however, this dissertation contends: that the novel is also conceived in a peculiarly humorous vein which accents and deepens its pathos; that this pathetic humor essentially springs from the novelist's insight into, and playful fictional “solutions” of, an insoluble human dilemma between amour and wisdom (i.e., Buddhist-Daoist ascetic liberation from human suffering); and that humor is palpable in the novel's metafictional style, paronomastic and polysemous language or discourse, characterization of the three principal protagonists, riddle-like structure, and thematization of “enlightenment through amour.” In so doing the dissertation explores a basically virgin dimension of the novel that has hitherto been obscured, overlooked, or ignored by the mainstream criticism, thereby complementing (rather than combating) the existing studies of the novel.; In order to contextualize its textual analysis of the novel, this study compares both Western and Chinese traditions of humor, especially ancient and modern conceptions or theories of humor—from the Platonic and Confucian restrictions on laughter and the laughable to the modern concepts of amiable and black humor, based on modern and contemporary philosophies of humor, the study emphasizes that pathos inheres in humor, and that a sufficient condition of humor is a “prehension” (aesthetic and playful perception) of sensible paradoxes. More importantly, the study embeds the humor in/of Honglou meng not only in the Chinese traditions of novelistic humor, riddling; and Chan (Zen) Buddhism but also in the literati ambiance of humor and romanticism in the late Ming and early Qing period (roughly from the 16th to the early 18th centuries). As a result, the study concludes that the pathetic humor of Honglou meng represents an unique aspect of humor in Ming-Qing fiction and the budding modernity of Chinese humor, thus bearing out—from a new angle—the richness, the depth of insights (into the human condition), and the greatness of this preeminent masterpiece of Chinese literature. |
