The reason why a masterpiece is a masterpiece is that its depth and breadth can cover the vast majority of human cognition and emotion. No matter how long it takes to precipitate, there are deeper content that can be referred to and studied. "Dream of the Red Chamber" has children's love, but it is by no means limited to children's love.
Dong Qing said: "Dream of the Red Chamber" is read shallowly as a children's love in a courtyard, and deep reading is the rise and fall of a dynasty. The so-called "children's love" is nothing more than a shell, through Bao Daichao's love entanglement, and then through the rise and fall of Jia Fu, behind which is a grand depiction of the end of feudal society "Qingming on the river map". What did Cao Xueqin say in the first episode of the opening chapter? "All the history of the wild has been the same, just like I don't use this set, but it is novel and unique, but only to take its physical reason, why should I be confined to the age of the dynasty!" 」 It can be seen that the novel's intention is far-reaching and the insight is exquisite. Balzac said that "the novel is the secret history of a people".
The ideological content of "Dream of the Red Chamber" has enough breadth and depth to touch every corner of society. From the royal palace to the countryside, there are small things such as viewing the moon and watching flowers, chanting poems and sentences, and there are also major events such as the princess provincial relatives, yamen judging cases, assisting the Ningguo Mansion, and copying and inspecting the Grand View Garden. "Dream of the Red Chamber" shows a tragic world of multiple levels and integration. The small things interspersed between the "children's love" are the epitome of the entire feudal edifice, and the whole novel "grass snake gray line, a thousand miles of veins" is small and big, and the meaning is quite deep. Behind the love story is the decline and fall of the four major families of Jia Shi Wang Xue, and the historical fate that the entire feudal system will inevitably collapse.
The structure of "Dream of the Red Chamber" completely breaks through the single-line structure mode of previous novels, adopting a network structure of multiple clues going hand in hand and staggering, which is why many people think that "Dream of the Red Chamber" is a love novel. Under such a grand framework, it includes multiple metaphors such as myths, the philosophy of causal reincarnation, the collapse of the feudal system, the rebellion of lower slaves against the system, the pursuit of freedom, and the beautiful ideal of individual liberation.
· The common work angered the mountain, the ground fell to the southeast, and there was an opening chapter of Nuwa to make up for the heavens, and the stone was also channeled and abandoned. This is the beginning of the story, the stone is carried into the red dust by a monk from Qinggeng Peak to experience the sorrow and joy of the world, and then by this monk to return to the Qinggeng Peak, forming a circular structure that fits the cycle of heaven and earth, and taking the mythological world as the background, unfolding the development and tragic ending of Bao Dai's love, parallel to the rise and fall of Jia Fu.
· The decline and fall of Jia Fu comes from spiritual absurdity and corruption, material poverty and luxury, many contradictions within the family, and many evils in society. Jia Yu killed Shi Duzi for twenty fans, and Wang Xifeng killed two people for the bribe of three thousand taels of silver, and the contradiction between this family and the whole society became increasingly acute and eventually was raided. Behind this is the ruler punishing one or two outlaws to alleviate the hatred of the broad masses of the people against the entire ruling class.
· The combination of Yingchun's Ya Gui Siqi and her cousin Pan You'an, You Sanjie's martyrdom with her life is the pursuit of free love, and the Mandarin Duck's suicide by hanging herself to escape the clutches of Jia Amnesty is also a desire for personal independence. The novel's celebration of these beautiful things is precisely where its intrinsic value lies.
As Lu Xun said, "(Dream of the Red Chamber) is a single fate, because of the reader's vision, there are various kinds: scribes see Yi, Taoists see obscenity, Caizi see entanglement, revolutionaries see full rows, gossipers see palace secrets... "Strange books, Taoists, writers, folklorists, historical research... It's all there.
There are 448 people in the whole book of "Dream of the Red Chamber" (according to the statistics of Jiang Qi during the Jiaqing period of the Qing Dynasty), and there are more than 300 people with names and surnames. As far as the main characters in the book are concerned, their appearance, clothing, conversation, and preferences are all the same, and the "real characters" who are created are flesh and blood, compared with the previous novels that "all women who write about women are "like flowers and jade, a face" and "who write adulterers, they use rat ears and eagle cheeks and other languages", which have undergone qualitative changes.
The narrative of "Dream of the Red Chamber" can be described as a huge detail, taking the "Baoyu being beaten" incident, before he was beaten, there were MingYan's study, Baoyu v. The Heart, Jiang Yuhan's gift of Qian Xiangluo, Jin Jun's tossing the well incident, and Jia Huan's whistle-blowing, which made Baoyu's beating a big event with many contradictions. After that, Qingwen sent handkerchiefs, Dai Yu inscription poems, Bao Chao sent medicines and other details showed the conflict between Bao Yu and the different life concepts of the people, and further revealed the contradiction between husband and wife, mother and child at that time. The novel is also extremely skilled in the use of language, whether it is action posture, mental activity, or painting scenes, it is always a few strokes to convey the subtlety. Daiyu's language is sharp and sharp, Baochao's language is gentle and subtle, Jia Zheng is pretentious, Feng Jie is humorous and witty, and there are as many personalities as there are characterized languages.
"Dream of the Red Chamber" has poems, dramas, sayings, and historical allusions. It can be said that it is a work that gathers the essence of the literature of the predecessors, and the opening chapter has a mythological story as far as the pre-Qin dynasty "Nuwa Supplementing the Heavens", and the drama text heard by Daiyu in the Lixiang Courtyard is "The Beautiful Scenery of the Heavens, the Delightful Whose Courtyard" is from the Ming Dynasty Tang Xianzu's "Peony Pavilion". "Dream of the Red Chamber" has a poetic and beautiful artistic conception, that is, it is deeply rooted in the golden bottle pot, but it can break through the naturalistic writing method of "Golden Bottle Plum", the content selected in the novel is quite aesthetic, the flowers when Dai Yu bury the flowers are all over the ground, lining the sisters and flowers; the Hantang Crane Shadow of the Concave Crystal Hall Dai Yu Xiangyun Lian poem, the cold moon poetry soul, all of which are engraved with poetry and painting, making people read very beautifully. In this regard, "Dream of the Red Chamber" has also truly come from life and is higher than life.
Back to the question, behind the children's love of "Dream of the Red Chamber" is the combination of personal fate, youth is easy to pass away, life is sad, family prosperity and decline, state power and national peril, the rise and fall of the world, mythological systems and even Taoist cosmic philosophy.
Cao Xueqin made a comprehensive refinement and condensed metaphor of literature, history and philosophy by making the simple complexity of individual human nature and the powerful and contradictory differences of collective human nature, giving infinite warnings and philosophical thoughts to future generations. Just as "The Lion King" and "Hamlet" are the same story, "The Trick of the City" and "The Count of Monte Cristo" are the same story, and what is hidden behind the story is unchanged, and the first to discover those things, or to express those things in the most classic way, is the reason why the masterpiece has become a masterpiece.