Chinese Literature, "The Daily Show," and "The Colbert Report"

“Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true;

Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real.”

 

From “Dreams of Red Mansions” by Cao Xueqin

 

“This couplet, which presides over an archway leading to the Land of Illusion … has long been regarded as  one succinct summation of that narrative’s ordering principle and thematic focus…it is the delight and constant effort of those readers to decipher the hidden signification of puns, enigmas, riddles, names, anagrams, metonyms, and oracular verses that stud the text. Whether all such devices add up finally to one grand and consistent scheme of narration that can justify the nomenclature of continuous allegory is a question still subject to debate.”

 

-Anthony C. Yu’s commentary upon the couplet.

 

Which leads me to thinking that this is why the trinity of informed comedy, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver, are the most respected television journalists working today, but in reverse. In our present political system, fiction is too often being treated as true, and truth is being presented as fiction, in this case, comedy.

 

Truths that are too difficult for politicians and the people to swallow are often most persuasively presented as fiction, from James F. Cooper’s defense of Indians (now seen as racist, but in his day he was their most radical defender), to Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” to Kirk and Uhura’s interracial kiss (the first on TV) to lesbianism on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

 

Now the journalists who are rubbing American’s noses hardest against the unforgiving solidity of reality are Steward, Colbert, and Oliver.  Their patient research puts the present in the context of the past, by pitting clips of Governor Bush and President Bush in debate with each other, by reviewing past promises of politicians, and by my favorite of all, “The Word,” in which falsity is placed in the context of irony.

 

And by making us laugh about it, by presenting themselves as entertainers instead of journalists, they dodge the bullets of accusations, like not being ‘fair and balanced’ or not being ‘objective’ which means they can tell the Truth instead of reporting mere facts. They can make an argument instead refereeing the exchange of sound bites between lobbyists, lawyers, and liars.

 

In “Dreams of Red Mansions,” there is a dualism between “zhen shi-yin” (also the name of a narrative character in the book) and “jia yu-cun” which mean “true events concealed” and “false language enduring” respectively.  In Chinese literature, this division is a philosophical paradox, the hero’s family name is even “Jia,” but in the America media it is a battle ground between liberal and conservative commentators with our comic trinity and their supporting cast ever ready to call “BS.”  “True events concealed” happens with every cover up and classification, while “false language enduring” refers to the enduring powers of fiction, be they the Big Lies or the too Big Truths that make up our culture.

 

“Whether all such devices add up finally to one grand and consistent scheme of narration that can justify the nomenclature of continuous allegory” depends a great deal upon your view of history.  Whether you believe in God, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, or Isaac Asimov, you implicitly accept history as a “scheme of narration” that can be understood through symbolic thought.  And if the world was truly chaotic, comedy would not work either, because in order for their comedy to make us laugh, it needs to contrast the order of the world with the order of our worldview. Colbert’s entire intro to his show is a homage to the importance of symbols to our political thought, and the rest of his show is a send up of our thoughts about them.

 

There are limitations to my comparison of an 18^th Century Chinese novel and 21^st Century America media.  “Dreams” was a single work of poetic philosophy about human desires meant for a small readership of the educated elite, while the American media is a chaotic mess of commentators sacrificing restraint and sometimes reason to grab millions of viewers.  And yet Cao realized that only fiction can tell the biggest truths, just as Stewart, Colbert, and Oliver have realized the only way to prod America with the shock of enlightenment is to make’em laugh.