and behavior of another person in order to achieve a desired end.
Such competence can only be immediately apprehended in the con-
text of a narrative, where the conditions of a poem’s production and
the effects of its reception can be ascertained. The motivation for
producing poem-bearing narratives, however, was to provide ideal
examples of the operation of poetry, not faithful records of it. They
cannot be used as a reliable basis for reconstructing how poetry
really was performed and received in ancient China; the only historical fact that we can be sure of is that these narratives were
written down at some point. The stories they narrate are surely a
mixture of what happened, what might have happened, and what
should have happened. The goal in this book is not to systematically
establish the social conditions of poetic production and reception,
but to delineate the evolving concept of what a poem is and the
changing idea of what one might plausibly achieve through poetic performance. Such stories fulfill and deny wishes for poetry and the
self—it is these wishes that merit our careful attention.
The housing of a poetic utterance within a narrative produces a
nested relationship with a poem at its center, which is diagrammed
in Figure 1 in the Appendix. At this point, I will beg the reader’s
patience while I lay down some of the theoretical groundwork
needed to build a rigorous analysis of the complex relationship that
arises between a poem and the narrative that houses it. The termi-
nology and concepts I discuss explicitly in the following paragraphs
inform the analysis of poetic competence in the rest of the book,
where I have tried to keep them implicit as much as possible.
The text of a poem in a narrative is the enduring trace of a par-
ticular spoken or written utterance, which bears the traces of the
circumstances of its being uttered. 5 The act of uttering a poem,
—————
5. The distinction between the act of uttering ( énonciation), the utterance ( énoncé ), and the traces of the former found in the latter is developed by Emile Benveniste in both volumes of his Problèmes de linguistique générale. Benveniste characterizes the énoncé as the oral utterance or written text produced by each act of énonciation. I prefer to reserve the term “text” to indicate the fixed pattern of words that persists in the memory or on the page after a particular act of uttering.
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Introduction
7
which may be called a performance, is in turn represented by the
text of a narrative. The performance of a poem is a moment of
practicing discourse—it is experienced over a brief span of time and
can never be fully recuperated. The contours of a performance are
implied by the utterance it produces (preserved as the poetic text)
and described by the utterance that houses it (preserved as the nar-
rative text). Clear understanding of the poetic text and its implied
performance can only be derived from knowledge of the position
occupied by the speaking subject and the immediate context of
the performance, the kind of knowledge conveyed by the narrative
text. In short, the poetic text opens up questions (who? where?
when? why? how? what?); the narrative text attempts to resolve
those questions with answers.
The narrative text is itself the trace of an act of uttering by a
narrator, who, as a speaking subject, is the construction of an author
or authors who utter the narrator into existence. Access to the
circumstances of production of the narrative text—the narrating—is
gained through explicit intrusion of the narratorial voice into the
narrative, which frequently occurs at the point of closure in Chinese
narratives. Access to the author’s construction of the narrator is
gained through paratexts, such as prefaces, colophons (peritexts), and external texts that mention the narrative text in question
(epitexts). The number of paratexts that may associate themselves
with a given text is open-ended, as is indicated in figure 1 by the
broken line that forms the outermost boundary.
The story that is told by the narrative describes the contours of
the poetic utterance depicted as an event within the story. From the
story, one can gain a sense of the poetic utterance as (1) a locutionary act, the fashioning of an utterance to articulate something to
someone; (2) an illocutionary act, the attempt to achieve something through an utterance; and (3) a perlocutionary act, which comprises the results of the utterance when it is received, which results may or
—————
Such a text can then be uttered again to form a new utterance, which may or may not persist in itself as a text. There are really two types of “trace”: (1) the trace that is the persistent text of a particular utterance made at a particular moment, and (2) the traces of the circumstances of the act of uttering that are found in an utterance.
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8
Introduction
may not coincide with what was intended in the illocutionary act. 6
Poetic competence can be succinctly defined as the ability to utter a
poem as a locutionary act with enough illocutionary force to bring
about the desired perlocutionary effects. The “acts” and the “effects”
need not be tangible; they might be as ineffectual in concrete terms
as venting one’s frustrations to generate sympathy in a listener.
Finally, three transcontextual forces shoot through the whole
complex of nested contexts that appears in figure 1. The first is intertextuality, which acknowledges that the boundaries between con-
texts are permeable, that a poetic text may call forth a certain nar-
rative text to satisfy its urgent questions (or that a narrative may tell a story that reaches a point of such emotional intensity that a poetic
utterance is inevitable), that an utterance at one level can effect
the uttering at another, and that utterances can migrate and com-
mingle. No single level of utterance is completely definitive and no
single level of uttering is completely determinative. There is always
another context for every context; even if one proceeds directly to
the center of the diagram, to the poetic utterance itself, it too may be construed as a context—the surrounding words—of the speaking
subject, which can only be known through the shape of the words
that emanate from it.
The second transcontextual force is discourse, which simply ac-
knowledges that all of the acts of uttering, the utterances made, and
the texts produced exist in time. Any two-dimensional diagram of a
practice that takes place over time immediately falls prey to the
synoptic illusion that results when practices such as discourse are
treated as though they can be frozen and analyzed in a state of sus-
pended animation. 7 When dealing with a collection of narrative texts, one is dealing with the textual traces of a set of practices that are irrevocably past. The texts themselves may be static, but a con-
—————
6. These three terms
were developed by J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words, which took up the work of John R. Searle and galvanized the entire branch of critical theory known as speech act theory. The model of speech act theory is too limited in itself—particularly in its analysis of power—to comprise all of the facets of poetic competence that will emerge in this book, but it does provide a useful point of departure.
7. See Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, pp. 10–11.
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Introduction
9
sideration of time and of space—of interval ( jian 間)—must be reinserted into an analysis of the practices implied by texts.
The third transcontextual force is power, which acknowledges
that all stories are told by people who wield varying amounts of
social power. It is obvious that a narrative is merely a representation
of reality, but it should also be kept in mind that it is a biased rep-
resentation fashioned to serve the needs and desires of the person or
people who generated and transmitted the narrative.
Why is this theoretical framework necessary in order to better
understand poetry? To enjoy a poem in a pristine textual state,
stripped of its paratexts and narrative context, is to resurrect but a
small portion of the person who uttered it—at a particular place and
time, to a particular audience, under a particular set of circum-
stances. 8 While the poem itself may yet shine brightly in our minds, the rest of these particulars persist as a faint corona of implications
to be cross-checked, verified, surmised through other sources, or
simply filled in with equal parts intuition and imagination. The
poem-bearing narrative provides a way to reinsert a poem into its
living context, or, more accurately, into a representation of its living context. In the simulacrum of reality forged by such narratives, an
ancient poem may be revivified as a vital mode of discourse with
affective and suasive power, as a means of exchanging thoughts and
feelings between people in the same place and time. The people, the world they inhabited—these are lost to us forever. But the fully
rounded articulation of one person’s interior to another—this can
live again through the power of a narrative, through its ability to
represent a world, its people, and their words.
Such a narrative carries within it the representation of the im-
mediate context of a poetic utterance: the circumstances of its
production and reception. It gives an indication of its social context:
the relative status of the parties involved and the nature of the arena
—————
8. There is poetry, especially poetry explicitly marked as non-occasional, that is uttered for a more general or diffuse audience, but this rules out neither a specific audience for the uttering of such a poem, nor the ability of a poet to have both a specific and general audience in mind simultaneously. There is also poetry that explicitly denies concern for an audience (certain poems by Tao Qian, Li Bai, Bai Juyi, and others), but such a denial only has force when made to an audience.
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10
Introduction
in which they discourse. When the narrative is part of a larger col-
lection of narratives that spans decades or centuries, the historical
context for the poetic utterance begins to emerge, and one can begin
to ascertain the changes that take place in attitudes toward poetic
practice over time. When that collection holds a preeminent place
in the textual legacy of a group of people, it expresses and gives
shape to the cultural context of the utterances represented within
it. Such a collection plays a role in determining what is sayable, who
may say it, and how it is said. Such culturally influential collections
are the source of the poem-bearing narratives that are the quarry of
this book.
III
This book takes four compilations of narrative texts as its case stud-
ies in poetic competence: the Zuo Tradition 左傳, the Han History 漢書, Topical Tales: A New Edition 世說新語, and Storied Poems
本事詩. Each compilation was fashioned for very different reasons,
but they all include narratives that depict poetic performance and
reception. They also share a similar composition in that each was
compiled from other sources spanning centuries, rather than being
written from beginning to end by a single author during his own
lifetime. This makes them useful cross-sections (albeit highly medi-
ated ones) of entire eras: the Eastern Zhou (770–256 b.c.e), Western
Han (206 b.c.e.–23 c.e.), Six Dynasties (265–589), and Tang (618–906),
respectively. Each of these collections was highly influential and, in
providing exemplars of poetic competence, surely shaped how sub-
sequent poetic practice was performed and depicted. The first three
books have been well studied for centuries, and I do not presume
to offer any new information on their composition; my goal is to
provide a new view of their contents pertaining to poetic perfor-
mance. The last book, Storied Poems, is less well known, and in addition to my analysis of its entries from the point of view of poetic
competence, I do provide an extended discussion of the history and
composition of the text, as well as copious translations (see Table 2
in the Appendix).
Chapter
1, “Performing the Tradition,” addresses the narratives
of the Zuo Tradition, which cover the period 722–468 b.c.e. and This content downloaded from 130.111.46.54 on Sat, 03 Aug 2019 08:33:23 UTC
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Introduction
11
were compiled by court historians from a larger body of lore (oral
and written) about the conduct and speech of the different states
of the Eastern Zhou era. These narratives depict the Traditionalist
儒家 advisors at the courts of these various states as refining a set of
practices through which they demonstrate their mastery of the
emerging canon of Poems 詩 as source material for performance
through intoning or singing (“offering a poem” 賦詩) and quotation
in speechmaking (“citing a poem” 引詩). The poetic competence
they develop is part of a wider cultural competence deployed to
ensure their place as advisors in the political hierarchy of the early
Chinese courts. These narratives repeatedly show that a judicious
use of poetic discourse can help one influence the thinking and
behavior of a superior, and that the reputation of oneself and one’s
kingdom can be enhanced or diminished by how well one repro-
duces and receives the Poems. The primacy of the Zuo Tradition in China’s narrative tradition establishes an enduring object lesson
about poetry: words from the past, well put in the present, consti-
tute a stake in the future.
Chapter
2, “Baring the Soul,” deals with the biographical narra-
tives found in the Han History compiled by Ban Gu 班固 (32–92
c.e.), many of which were derived from the Historical Records 史記
compiled by Sima Qi
an 司馬遷 (ca. 145–85 b.c.e.). In narrating the
history of the Former Han dynasty (206 b.c.e.–23 c.e.), these nar-
ratives include songs that were putatively improvised by members
of the Han royal house under circumstances of distress. The narra-
tives conform to a model of literary production that Sima Qian calls
“venting frustration” 發憤, in which people who are powerless to
carry out their ambitions turn to literary expression as a means of
compensating for their impotence. This marks a shift from the
pre-Qin model found in the Zuo Tradition of citing the inherited words of the Poems in a premeditated fashion, to the production of original poetry as a result of spontaneous outbursts in song form.
With this shift from the use of inherited words to the production of
new words comes an attendant loss in suasive power. None of the
poetic utterances in the Han History seems to accomplish anything of immediate value for the people who perform them. In the hands
of the historians who fashioned these narratives, however, the
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12
Introduction
poetic outburst becomes an effective way to capture the interior
qualities of men and women who have been defeated but deserve a
last word. Under this model, poetic competence shifts from adept
use of old words to the heartfelt expression of new words and their
subsequent insertion into biographical narratives, where they will
exert an enduring power in shaping posterity.
Chapter
3, “Playing the Game,” takes up the anecdotal narratives
found in Topical Tales: A New Edition, which were compiled under the auspices of Liu Yiqing 劉義慶 (403–444), a prince of the Liu
Song dynasty (420–479)—one of the Six Dynasties that followed one
another during the extended time of disunion that followed the
collapse of the Han dynasty. These narratives, spanning the two
centuries from the fall of the Han to the time of Liu Yiqing, dem-
onstrate a subtle combination of the two models of poetic compe-
tence outlined above. The characters depicted within are equally
Words Well Put Page 2