Words Well Put
Visions of Poetic Competence in the
Chinese Tradition
Harvard-Yenching Institute Monographs Series 60
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Words Well Put
Visions of Poetic Competence in the
Chinese Tradition
Graham Sanders
Published by the Harvard University Asia Center
for the Harvard-Yenching Institute and
distributed by Harvard University Press
Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London, 2006
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© 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Printed in the United States of America
The Harvard-Yenching Institute, founded in 1928 and headquartered at Harvard University, is a foundation dedicated to the advancement of higher education in the humanities and social sciences in East and Southeast Asia. The Institute supports advanced research at Harvard by faculty members of certain Asian universities and doctoral studies at Harvard and other universities by junior faculty at the same universities. It also supports East Asian studies at Harvard through contributions to the Harvard-Yenching Library and publication of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and books on premodern East Asian history and literature.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sanders, Graham Martin.
Words well put : visions of poetic competence in the Chinese tradition /
Graham Sanders.
p. cm. – (Harvard-Yenching Institute monograph series ; 60)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-674-02140-1 (alk. paper)
1. Chinese poetry--History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series.
pl2307.s34 2006
895.1'1009--dc22
2005029569
Index by Jake Kawatski
Printed on acid-free paper
Last number below indicates year of this printing
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
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For Chia Chia
for everything
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Contents
Introduction
1
1 Performing the Tradition
15
2 Baring the Soul
73
3 Playing the Game
111
4 Gleaning the Heart
157
5 Placing the Poem
203
Conclusion
279
Appendix
285
Works Cited
293
Index
301
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This content downloaded from 130.111.46.54 on Sat, 03 Aug 2019 08:33:10 UTC
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Words Well Put
Visions of Poetic Competence in the
Chinese Tradition
This content downloaded from 130.111.46.54 on Sat, 03 Aug 2019 08:33:10 UTC
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Introduction
October 19, 2000. I was walking to my office at the University of Toronto on a cloudy morning. I had just turned the corner from London Street onto Bathurst Street, and there, across from the subway station, was a red mailbox that I had passed a thousand times before. The side of it was encrusted with advertisements, posters, stickers, graffiti—but one message, carefully printed in black ink on a white nametag (the kind that says, “Hello, my name is . . .”), caught my eye. It read: You were what you said; you are what is in your head.
It struck me as significant, as somehow true. I filed it away in my memory with the thought that I might use it as the epigraph for a book someday.
I
Before I can even begin to discuss the notion of poetic competence
in the Chinese tradition, I must consider the status of the surviv-
ing premodern texts that contain descriptions of poems being com-
posed, performed, and received. When faced with thousands upon
thousands of books resting silently upon shelves, it is often easy to
forget that every text in those books comes from the hand of a
human being. And a good number of premodern Chinese texts were
transmitted with the mouth before they were set down by hand. It
is not always possible to identify a point of origin for a text—a par-
ticular act of production (oral or written) by a particular person at a
particular time. Many texts seem to have emerged over time, among
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2
Introduction
groups of people, large and small. Some texts may have had an initial
point of production, but have mutated through centuries of re-
production. They come down to us by way of breath, bone, bronze,
stone, bamboo, silk, and paper, jumping from one medium to an-
other, evolving in their journey, spawning variants, interpolations,
excisions, and paraphrases. However these texts may have ended up
between the covers of books, they are certainly marked by their
journey outside those covers. They are all traces of a larger realm
that may be called discourse, which I define as the entire range of
verbal practices through which human beings articulate themselves
to others in specific contexts. A particular instance of discourse may
be called an utterance. Thus a text is the trace of an oral or written
utterance that endures beyond its original context, a context that,
once past, can only ever be postulated rather than known. Discourse
is experienced in the context of the moment; once the moment has
passed, only its traces remain.
Discourse, as the etymology of the word suggests, is a “run-
ning away” ( discurrere) from the human subject. Each utterance—
whether it be made in speech or writing—moves beyond the control
of the person who produced it once it is received by others. It was
never completely under the control of the producing subject in the
first place, for he or she is always-already conditioned to produce
certain types of discourse in certain situations—conditioned by the
social position he or she occupies, conditioned by the web of past
texts and current discourse that already defines that position. One
can unders
tand each surviving text as the trace of a speaking sub-
ject’s attempt to negotiate his or her position in relation to others,
and in relation to the entire complex of discourse that defines those
positions. Every text is the trace of a performance, an act of a dis-
coursed subject discoursing.
Once a text is understood as the trace of a performance, it be-
comes imperative to establish the context of that performance. Any
given context is actually made up of a nested series of osmotic
contexts. The immediate context of an utterance includes the cir-
cumstances of its production and reception: who was present, where
the parties were located, when the utterance was made, when it was
received, what events recently occurred, and what possible out-
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Introduction
3
comes hang in the balance. The significance of these variables is
conditioned by the social context of the utterance, which defines the
positions occupied by the producer and receiver and the milieu in
which they move. The social context is in turn temporally shaped
by a historical context; thus, positions must be understood dia-
chronically in their development as well as synchronically in their
relationships. These contexts simultaneously give rise to and are
encompassed by a cultural context that determines what can and
cannot be said in a given realm of discourse, depending on received
ideas of what is appropriate to various positions in society.
Any attempt to delineate the immediate, social, historical, and
cultural contexts of an utterance is really an attempt to arrest an
instance of discourse, to keep it from “running away” long enough
that it may be fully appreciated. Such an arrest is made in name only,
however, because of the simple fact that every past context is itself
accessible only through texts. Our understanding of premodern
China is no exception—only through an understanding derived
from texts do any surviving extratextual material artifacts or loca-
tions gain their significance. Objects cannot speak fully by them-
selves in a culture so persistently and pervasively defined by texts as
China’s. Witness the Chinese obsession with inscribing material
objects—bones, shells, stelae, cauldrons, bells, mirrors, fans, lutes,
paintings, walls, bodies, cliffs, textiles—there is scarcely a type of
object that has not been inscribed, woven, carved, branded, or
otherwise marked by signs. The entire realm of discourse that was
premodern China—every instance of discourse that left its trace as a
text, every context that now persists as a trace of discourse—appears
to us as would the jewel net of Indra, with each text reflecting and
being reflected by every other text. The task of the critic—one task
at least—is to attempt to uncover the speaking subject implied in a
given text. A careful assessment of the multivalent contexts of an
utterance implied in a text—the persistent trace of a discursive per-
formance—can reveal the desires and anxieties of the speak-
ing/writing subject who made the utterance. But what is the status
of the subject thus revealed?
In the second chapter of the Zhuangzi 莊子, “Discourse on
Considering All Things as Equal” 齊物論, it is written:
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4
Introduction
The one who dreams of drinking wine may cry and weep when morning
comes; the one who dreams of crying and weeping may set out on a hunt
when morning comes. When they were dreaming, they did not know that
they were dreaming. In the midst of a dream, one may even interpret a
dream within the dream and only realize that it was all a dream upon
waking. And so only after a Great Awakening will we know that this too is all a Great Dream. It is a fool who claims that he is already awake and is self-assured in this knowledge. He fancies himself a lord or just a shepherd?
Such pigheadedness! Confucius himself is and you too are both dreaming.
And when I tell you that you are dreaming—that too is a dream.
夢飲酒者。旦而哭泣。夢哭泣者。旦而田獵。方其夢也。不知其夢
也。夢之中又占其夢焉。覺而後知其夢也。且有大覺而後知此其大夢
也。而愚者自以為覺。竊竊然知之。君乎。牧乎。固哉。丘也與女。皆
夢也。予謂女夢。亦夢也。1
The speaking subject in this passage admits that his discourse, his
“telling you,” is just as unsubstantiated as his claim that our entire
reality is unsubstantiated. His admission is a deft rhetorical move
that serves to strengthen his argument by acting as its own case in
point. There can be no Great Awakening for the critical project. It
will always be interpreting a dream within a dream. The speaking
subject of an utterance and the critic’s attempt to discover that
subject may be nothing more than the convergence of a mass of
texts, but this should not mitigate the value of the discovery. For
how people construct and portray themselves as speaking sub-
jects—how they dream—is worth knowing.
II
Texts in the Chinese tradition are rarely lonely. On their journey to
the reading present, they often pick up fellow travelers in the form
of prefaces, colophons, commentaries, annotations, anecdotes,
companion pieces, and a host of other texts that are in a transtextual relationship with the core text. 2 The poem ( shi 詩) seems to be more
—————
1. Wang Xianqian 王先謙, Zhuangzi jijie 莊子集解, pp. 24–25. Translations from Chinese are my own unless otherwise noted.
2. Gérard Genette defines transtextuality as “everything which puts the text in explicit or implicit relationship with other texts” ( Palimpsestes, 7). He has identified This content downloaded from 130.111.46.54 on Sat, 03 Aug 2019 08:33:23 UTC
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Introduction
5
gregarious than most texts in this respect. It usually travels with a
title, at the very least, and often picks up a preface and a commen-
tary somewhere along the way. It tends to travel in packs, grouped
together with other poems of the same provenance, theme, form, or
some other characteristic held in common. Occasionally, a poem or
a portion of a poem will hitch a ride inside another text—a speech,
essay, or narrative of some kind. It is this last mode of travel—a poem being borne by a narrative—that is the subject of this book.
The act of narrating ( narration) produces a narrative text ( récit) that tells a story ( histoire). 3 Thus a narrative is the textual trace of a particular act of uttering a narrative. The story told by that narrative might recount characters uttering their own utterances, in-
cluding poems. The poem-bearing narrative (especially a narrative
in the classical language of histories, biographies, and anecdotal
collections) subordinates the poem to the narrative, relegating the
producti
on (or reproduction through citation) of the poem to the
status of an event in the story. 4 In other words, the narrative is told by the voice of a narrator, who relates a story in which characters
appear and in turn speak in their own voices through discourse,
poetic and otherwise. Such a narrative holds out the hope of re-
covering, to some degree, the multivalent contexts of a poetic ut-
terance.
—————
five such relationships: (1) intertextuality—the presence of one text within another (citation, allusion); (2) paratextuality—auxiliary texts that frame a main text ( peritexts, such as the title, preface, or footnotes, appear in the same volume, and epitexts, such as conversations or correspondence, appear outside the main text); (3) meta-textuality—commentary on a text, such as literary criticism; (4) hypertextuality—
transformation of a hypotext into a new form (translation, parody, versification, etc.); and (5) architextuality—the power of genre to determine and classify the nature of texts. A useful summary of this taxonomy is Barbara Havercroft’s article in Makaryk, Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, p. 335.
3. Genette develops the full ramifications of this tripartite relationship throughout Narrative Discourse and Narrative Discourse Revisited.
4. The alternative to this subordinate relationship is a coordinate one: the use of poetic discourse by the narrator rather than by characters in the story depicted by the narrative. This appears most frequently in vernacular stories and novels because of their tendency to mimic the form of oral storytelling performance, in which spoken narrative and chanted or sung poetry (often with musical accompaniment) are alternately used to relate a story to the audience.
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6
Introduction
“Poetic competence” is the term I use to designate the ability of a
person to deploy poetic discourse as a means of affecting the attitude
Words Well Put Page 1