The Poetics of Sovereignty
Page 48
orders to the officials, saying,
於是酒中樂酣，天子芒然而思，似若有亡，曰，嗟乎，此大奢侈。朕
以覽聽餘閒，無事棄日。順天道以殺伐，時休息於此。恐後棄糜麗，
遂往而不返，非所以為繼嗣創業垂統也。於是乎乃解酒罷獵，而命
有司，曰：
“What lands can be opened for cultivation,
地可墾闢，
Restore them all over to farmland
悉為農郊，
To provide for the common people;
以贍萌隸，
Tear down walls and fill in moats,
隤牆填塹，
So the people of the hills and swamps can come here; 使山澤之人得至焉。
Replenish the pools and lift the bans,
實陂池而勿禁，
Empty the palaces and do not refill them;
虛宮館而勿仞，
Open the granaries to give succor to the poor,
發倉廩以救貧窮，
And furnish what they lack!
補不足。
We take pity on the widowers and widows,
恤鰥寡，
Care for the orphaned and childless;
存孤獨，
We shall issue virtuous commands,
出德號，
Reduce punishments and penalties,
省刑罰，
Reform the social institutions,
改制度，
And change the colors of vestments!
易服色。
We will revise the first day of the year,
革正朔，
To mark a new beginning for the empire!”
與天下為更始。10
—————
10. Wen xuan, 1.376–77. I have consulted the English translations of the passage in Watson, trans., Chinese Rhyme-Prose, p. 49; and Knechtges, trans., Wen xuan, or Selections of Refined Literature, vol. 2, pp. 109–111. See also the discussion of this passage in Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, pp. 46–47.
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272
Palatial Form and the Rhapsodic Imagination
Having spent himself in pleasure, the emperor now sees with clear eyes
the truth of his extravagance and gains a moral enlightenment that oth-
erwise would have eluded him. In this moment of sudden reversal, we
might hear an echo of the passage in the Mencius, in which King Hui of
Liang 梁惠王 (r. 369–319 bc) asks Mencius if it is appropriate to enjoy
his park with its various extravagances. Mencius replies by shaming the
king: he compares King Hui’s private enjoyment of luxuries with the leg-
endary King Wen of Zhou, who shared his park with the people who had
built it for him.11 Mencius’ point is that pleasure is legitimate when shared.
However, the Son of Heaven in the rhapsody goes one better than Men-
cius by negating the very site of pleasure, converting the wasteful expendi-
ture of the park back into the productivity of farmland.
Gong Kechang notes that Sima Xiangru’s “disapproval of imperial dis-
sipation and extravagance” would become “the main substance” of later
fu.12 This is something of an overstatement. It is difficult from what we
have of Sima Xiangru’s corpus, or even of the surviving early rhapsodies,
to state definitively that the poet intended the moralizing climax as any-
thing more than a conventional or strategic gesture.13 At least, the glaring
imbalance between the rhapsody’s encyclopedic accounts of sovereign
power and the brief, appended moment of enlightenment suggest that the
rhapsody’s moralism is not exactly to be taken at face value, as the “point”
of the composition. Rather, the rhapsody’s representation of moral en-
lightenment is part of the convention of dingqing 定情, or “stilling the
passions.” Paul Rouzer, who also discusses the passage above, points out
how the convention is based on the premise that the claim of virtue must
be tested, that virtue is not virtue if the possibility of vice is never
broached.14
Yet by claiming that pleasure must be experienced to its utmost in or-
der to still the passions, the poem complicates its condemnation of des-
—————
11. See Mengzi, 1A.2 / Mengzi zhengyi, 2.44–50.
12. Gong, Studies on the Han Fu, p. 147.
13. Knechtges writes, “Thus, the only extant examples of court compositions are the fu of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju, which survive because they contain at least a modicum of moral teaching. However, the didactic pieces probably are not typical of the period, and perhaps not even of Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju, for only a small portion of his twenty-nine-piece corpus survives.” In Knechtges, “Emperor and Literature,” p. 59.
14. See Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, p. 52.
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Palatial Form and the Rhapsodic Imagination
273
potic desire. It is necessary that the Son of Heaven exhaust himself in his
revels, because without this experience of extravagant waste, he cannot rid
himself of desires and become enlightened. The moment of ethical reali-
zation is an act of dialectical negation—and in this poem, it is literally a
negation: the Son of Heaven simply erases the site of his pleasures by tear-
ing down the park and its buildings. In this way, the despot and the sage-
king are bound to one another, not simply as mirror images within the
political and literary imaginaries, but as two faces of the same coin. The
very possibility of the sage-king is based upon the premise—and
negation—of the despot.
If this is the case, then the rhapsodic representation of despotism is
never unambiguous. The exercise of sovereign power without self-
legislated limitations would seem to be simple immorality, but the rhap-
sody depends upon an economy that turns seemingly wasteful expendi-
tures into moral productivity. Yet, in some ways, the moral ending Sima
Xiangru felt necessary to attach is somewhat superfluous. The premise
that extravagant representation can have a moral end is already present in
the idea of epideixis. That is, if the rhapsody—and court poetry, in
general—constitutes the image of the sovereign in the political imaginary,
then its extravagant language is of the utmost necessity—it is the coin by
which the work of the poet has any value or significance.
An Anecdote about Taizong and Rhapsodies
The questions posed by Sima Xiangru were of great importance to Tang
Taizong, who, as we have seen, was quite familiar with the “Rhapsody on
the Imperial Park.” For Taizong, the genre of the rhapsody posed serious
questions in terms of imperial representation and the orthodoxy of litera-
ture. The following anecdote is illustrative of the problem:
At the beginning of the Zhenguan reign, Taizong said to Fang Xuanling, “Recently,
I looked at the histories of the Former and Latter Han. Recorded within them
were Yang Xiong’s “Sweet Springs” and “Plume Hunt” rhapsodies, Sima Xiangru’s
“Master Emptiness” and “Imperial Park” rhapsodies, and Ban Gu’s “Two Capitals
Rhapsody.” Since this genre is florid and ornate, and without benefit
to moral en-
couragement or admonishment, for what reason would these be included within
historical documents? The histories contain memorials for the emperor that dis-
cuss matters of concern; the wording and principles are blunt and to the point, and
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274
Palatial Form and the Rhapsodic Imagination
can be of assistance to the one who governs. We may or may not follow the advice,
but they all should be set in writing and kept at hand.
貞觀初，太宗謂監修國史房玄齡曰，比見前後漢史，載錄楊雄《甘
泉》、《羽獵》，司馬相如《子虛》、《上林》，班固《兩都賦》，
此既文體浮華，無益勸誡，何假書之史策。其有上書論事，詞理切
直，可裨於政理者，朕從與不從，皆須備載。15
The anecdote portrays Taizong as making the kind of argument one
might expect from an advocate of classicist literary orthodoxy. Taizong’s
criticism of the rhapsody is rather unrefined, lacking any differentiation
between the works of the Western Han poets Sima Xiangru and Yang
Xiong, and the work of the Eastern Han poet-historian Ban Gu. The
claim that rhapsodies are “without benefit to moral encouragement or
admonishment,” moreover, both glosses over the complexity of Sima
Xiangru’s work and overlooks how Yang Xiong himself had repudiated
his earlier work as a rhapsodist in his Fa yan 法言 ( Model Sayings).
The point of the anecdote becomes clear, however, when Taizong
names the genre that he opposes to the rhapsody—the memorial ( shu 書).
It is odd to contrast the rhapsody with the memorial, as these two genres
would seem to have little in common and belong to very different occa-
sions. Yet the point of intersection is the way the two genres imagine the
sovereign as audience. When Taizong says of the memorial that “the
wording and principles are blunt and to the point, and can be of assis-
tance to the one who governs” 詞理切直，可裨於政理者, he is show-
ing that he can resist the seduction of the poet-courtier’s epideictic spec-
tacle and accept the criticisms of his officials. He is not simply opposing
the inclusion of rhapsodies in the historical record, but implicitly charg-
ing Han Wudi (and later Han emperors) with choosing false praise over
truthful remonstrance. Taizong even evaluates the memorials in the same
way that prior literary critics had evaluated poetry, naming the precise
quality of the genre’s diction ( ci 詞) and the content ( li 理) and thereby elevating the seemingly utilitarian genre to a lofty new status.
It goes without saying that this anecdote has to be understood as a rhe-
torical performance and not as presenting the emperor’s actual views on
the rhapsody. After all, Taizong is known to have composed five xiaofu
—————
15. Recorded in Zhenguan zhengyao, 7.344; and Da Tang xinyu, 9.134. Also translated in Wilhelm and Knechtges, “T’ang T’ai-tsung’s Poetry,” p. 2.
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Palatial Form and the Rhapsodic Imagination
275
小賦 or “minor rhapsodies,” so he could not have been utterly opposed to
the genre.16 The longest and arguably most interesting of his fu is a piece
entitled “Rhapsody on Looking Out from the Layered Terrace” 臨層臺
賦.17 In many ways, this work can be seen as an attempt to justify the
rhapsodic spectacle of imperial power, responding to the problems raised
in Sima Xiangru’s work. There was also another, more immediate concern
for Taizong, since the unnamed object of the poem was a palace that Tai-
zong was engaged in building. Internal textual evidence strongly suggests
that the palace in which Taizong set his rhapsody was the Daming Palace
大明宮, which he began building in 634.18 If this identification is correct,
then the poem would be the first textual representation of the palace that
would become the main imperial residence for later Tang emperors.19
The Early Discourse on Palaces
The literary representation of palaces ( gongdian 宮殿) has a long history,
and it is a history that builds upon discourses on the palace within early
ritual and philosophical writings. The palace designated the complex of
structures that included the sovereign’s official abode, residential build-
ings for his immediate family, and halls for holding court and audiences.
These structures formed a city in miniature, termed the palace-city ( gong-
cheng 宮城), which was demarcated from the rest of the capital by a cir-
—————
16. One of these, “Rhapsody on the Majestic Phoenix” 威鳳賦, may be found in Chuxue ji, 30.725–726. The other four are included in Wenyuan yinghua. For “Rhapsody on the Small Mountain” 小山賦, see Wenyuan yinghua, 27.121c–121d; for “Rhapsody on the Small Pond” 小池賦, see Wenyuan yinghua, 35.158a–158b; for “Looking Out from the Layered Terrace,” see Wenyuan yinghua, 57.262b–263a; for “Rhapsody on Being Stirred by the Past” 感舊賦, see Wenyuan yinghua, 91.413a–413c. “Looking Out from the Layered Terrace,” “Being Stirred by the Past,” and “Small Pond” rhapsodies are also included in Tang Taizong huangdi ji, reprinted in Tang wushi jia shiji fu suoyin, pp. 1a–2a. All five fu are in Quan Tang wen, 4.46a–48b; and with annotations in Tang Taizong quanji jiaozhu, pp.
105–122. Friedrich A. Bischoff has translated and discussed “Rhapsody on the Small
Pond,” in his Interpreting the Fu, pp. 115–87.
17. Little has been written on this work. It is briefly discussed in Paek Sŭng-seok, “Chu Tang fu yanjiu,” pp. 33–34.
18. For modern scholarship, see Hiraoka Takeo, Chōan to Rakuyō: Chizu; Saehyang P.
Chung, “Study of the Daming Palace”; and Xiong, Sui-Tang Chang’an, pp. 79–97.
19. Saehyang Chung identifies the Tang liudian as the earliest textual mention of the palace in “Study of the Daming Palace,” p. 23. For the reference, see Tang liudian, 7.218–19.
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Palatial Form and the Rhapsodic Imagination
cumclosing wall.20 The palace-city stood as the chief architectural repre-
sentation of sovereign power, not only marking the site where the sover-
eign expended his energies in the service of the empire, but also serving as
a visible monument to the power incorporated in his person. In discussing
Louis XIV and his palace at Versailles, the semiotician Louis Marin makes
a similar point: “the monarch in his palace, visited by his subjects, is like
an Argus with a hundred eyes that no gaze can escape; he is at once his
château in continuous expansion in space and time and its center, or heart,
which gives it its meaning and receives from the structures that scan and
articulate this space and time the legitimization of its symbolic reality.”21
That is, even when the sovereign was physically absent from the capital,
his metaphysical authority would still remain, invested in the form of the
palatial structure.
> The beginnings of a palatial discourse may be found in the “Kaogong
ji,” a text that replaced the missing last section of the Rites of Zhou.22 The commentarial tradition interpreted the following passage as a description
of the palace layout in the Duke of Zhou’s capital, Wangcheng 王城 (lit-
erally, “The King’s City”):
The craftsmen built the city as a square of nine li per side and each side with three gates. Within the city, there were nine north-south arteries and nine east-west boulevards. The roads of the north-south arteries measured nine axle-
lengths across. On the left was the ancestral temple; on the right, the altars to soil and grain. In front was the royal court, and behind it, the marketplace.
匠人營國，方九里，旁三門。國中九經、九緯。經涂九軌。左祖右
社，面朝後市。23
The palace is indicated here by the site of the royal court ( chao 朝), situ-
ated between the ancestral temple and the sacrificial altars to the gods of
soil and grain.24 Taken together, these three structures constitute the very
—————
20. Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning, pp. 12–13.
21. See Marin, Portrait of the King, p. 191.
22. See Boltz, “Chou li,” p. 25.
23. See Zhou li zhushu, 41.289b–89c, in Shisanjing zhushu, p. 927.
24. There are numerous commentaries on this passage. See, for example, Shen Menglan 沈
夢蘭 (1762–1822), Zhou li xue 周禮學, in Xuxiu Siku quanshu, vol. 81, pp. 217b–219a.
Within English-language scholarship, see Wright, “Cosmology of the Chinese City,” pp.
47–49; Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning, pp. 33–36; Wu, Monumentality, pp.
100–102; and Xiong, Sui-Tang Chang’an, pp. 40–43.
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Palatial Form and the Rhapsodic Imagination
277
basis of dynastic political theology: the cults of agriculture, ancestors, and
kingship. Other markers of politico-religious significance include the
square shape of the planned city, which recalls the square earth in stan-