The Poetics of Sovereignty
Page 66
tations, and digressions that transform his poetry into something
more than literary propaganda. Knowledge of this tension between the
poem and the self allows one to hear both the ambivalence and the hint of
poignancy that mark the closing lines of “The Imperial Capital Poems,” in
which Taizong receives the blessings of sacrifices that he desired fervently
to perform, but never would perform, during his lifetime.
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Conclusion
When the Tang established their empire, they decided to keep the seat of
imperial power within the Guanzhong 關中 Region, or “the Land within
the Passes.” This decision was informed by cultural and strategic reasons.
Not only was the Guanzhong Region where the Zhou and Han capitals
had stood, but it had long been considered a naturally fortified site. In his
“Two Capitals Rhapsody,” Ban Gu once wrote that, “With its barriers
that obstruct and repel, / It is the remote stronghold of Heaven and
Earth” 防禦之阻，則天地之隩區焉.1 The echo of this sentiment
could be heard centuries later, in Taizong’s first poem from the set of ten
“Imperial Capital Poems,” where the capital was transformed into a celes-
tial vision, one that was nonetheless rooted firmly in the heroic strength
of the topography. Indeed, the significance ascribed to the Guanzhong
Region would endure well into the twentieth century. The modern histo-
rian Chen Yinque would famously attribute the geographic advantages of
the Guanzhong Region to the triumph and preservation of empire, writ-
ing, “This point can explain . . . when Sui Yangdi went far roaming to the
Southland, why he ended by losing the country; and when Tang Gaozu
quickly seized the ‘Land within the Passes’, why he alone achieved the im-
perial patrimony” 此點可以解釋…隋煬帝遠遊江左，所以卒喪邦
家，唐高祖速據關中，所以獨成帝業.2
What Chen recognizes is how the fortunes of Sui Yangdi and Tang
Gaozu can be mapped out through their geographical decisions. He iden-
tifies the beginning of Yangdi’s downfall as the Sui emperor’s decision in
—————
1. See Wen xuan, 1.6.
2. Chen Yinque, Tangdai zhengzhishi shulungao, p. 51.
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378
Conclusion
the summer of 616 to abandon the Guanzhong region (and the Sui capital
of Daxingcheng) in favor of Jiangdu. Gaozu’s strategy, then, of quickly
sending his forces to take the Guanzhong region after declaring rebellion in
617, presents a historical antithesis, one that Chen sees as the crucial first
step in the Tang conquest of the Sui.
Chen Yinque’s statement echoes and recalls one made by Sima Qian
concerning the Chu nobleman Xiang Yu, the great rival to Liu Bang, who
defeated the armies of Qin but lost his chance to win the empire when he
“turned his back on Guanzhong and embraced Chu” 背關懷楚.3 It is
worth noting here how both Xiang Yu and Yangdi are remembered
throughout history as quitting the Guanzhong Region for selfish motives.
Xiang Yu, who burned down the palaces of the Qin capital in Guanzhong,
desired to return to his homeland of Chu so that he could enjoy his tri-
umph in style. This occasioned a wonderfully biting remark from an ob-
server, who said, “People say the people of Chu are only washed monkeys
fitted with hats—now I see it is indeed so” 人言楚人沐猴而冠耳，果
然.4 For Yangdi, on the other hand, it was the desire to escape the trou-
bles of the north, which had collapsed into widespread rebellions, and to
seek refuge in a city that was both his former powerbase and a site of pri-
vate pleasures.
There is, however, another allusion within Chen Yinque’s statement,
one that provides a different, more literary dimension to the historical cri-
tique of Sui Yangdi. By casting Yangdi’s retreat to Jiangdu as a “far roam-
ing,” Chen is not only criticizing the Sui emperor for his love of extrava-
gant touring, but he is also connecting Yangdi’s final voyage south to “Far
Roaming” 遠遊, from the Chu ci. There is no small measure of irony in
this allusion, as “Far Roaming” is a poem that describes the mystical as-
cent of an adept who soars through the universe, visits the deities of the
cardinal directions, and, in the end, becomes one with the Great Origi-
nary (“Taichu” 太初).5 Whereas the adept, by completing a ritual circuit
of the cosmos, gains absolute power over the cosmos, Yangdi’s “far roam-
—————
3. Shi ji, 7.339.
4. Shi ji, 7.315. I am grateful to Prof. Mark Edward Lewis for pointing out Chen Yinque’s allusion to Xiang Yu.
5. For the text of “Yuanyou,” see Chuci buzhu, 5.163 –75. On the poem as an example of ascension literature, see Puett, To Become a God, pp. 201 –24.
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Conclusion
379
ing” signifies his abdication of all sovereign responsibility and authority.6
Yangdi’s final days in Jiangdu become the stuff of historical romance, as
he is lost in drunken pleasure in his Milou 迷樓, his “Tower of Going As-
tray,” and blissfully ignorant of the collapsing empire all around him.
Here, notice how the discourses of sovereignty themselves may be con-
structed according to a poetic logic, how the narratives of history are be-
holden to the literary imagination. The literary allusions with which
Chen Yinque adorns his critical analysis speak to an underlying cultural
logic, one that was first voiced within poetry. If, as we have seen in the
course of this study, the history of sovereignty has shaped the history of
poetry, we may also say that the history of sovereignty has been shaped by
poetry. The poetic history of tropes, images, gestures, and commonplaces
do not only ornament the telling of history, they also intervene in this
process—sometimes, as in the example of Sui Yangdi, with far-reaching
consequences.
Of course, not every poetic intervention is the stuff of historical my-
thology. The received image of Tang Taizong owes more, certainly, to his
political and military achievements than to his poetry—and he himself
argued much the same point, publicly dismissing the importance of po-
etry. Nevertheless, it is in Taizong’s poetry that we first begin to see how
the myth of Taizong first took hold. Self-mythologization is not so dis-
tinct from self-divinization, from the kinds of folly to which Qin Shi-
huang and Han Wudi were susceptible. Yet Taizong’s poems were often
more complex than the desire to achieve immortality; they spoke both to
the ruler’s moral aims and to the seductive pleasures he could always enjoy,
framing a more dialectical and nuanced understanding of imperial repre-
sentation. If Taizong, like Han Gao
zu, could feel the ambivalence of the
imperial role, he could also show how that ambivalence constituted more
than a desire for the simpler freedoms of village life, how greater pleasure
lay in the community of an empire at peace. And when Taizong was
tempted by the sensual pleasures of palace life, he would nevertheless take
the occasion to demonstrate how resisting temptation would lead to mor-
al realization, how greater satisfaction could be found in the perusal of
learned writings.
—————
6. I borrow the idea of the ritual circuit from Hawkes, “Quest of the Goddess,” pp. 62 –63.
A related discussion may be found in Sangren, “Power and Transcendence.”
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380
Conclusion
The self-representation of imperial virtue is easily taken for propa-
ganda, and throughout this study, I have argued that the relationship be-
tween poetic and sovereign discourses should be understood as constitu-
tive, and not merely in terms of questions of dynastic legitimation,
coercion, or persuasion. While much of the brute fact of sovereign power
may be characterized, in the words of Bruce Lincoln, as “the whole theat-
rical array of gestures, demeanors, costumes, props, and stage devices
through which one may impress or bamboozle an audience,” what this
view overlooks is the extent to which the sovereign is always also subject
to the theater of authority and thus inextricably part of the same audience
that he or she is addressing.7
Even more one-sided is the model of sovereignty formulated by the
twentieth-century German political thinker Carl Schmitt. Schmitt writes,
“Sovereign is he who decides upon the exception.” Schmitt locates the
power of the sovereign outside of the political community, since the sov-
ereign is understood as being autonomous from the very legal system over
which he presides.8 However, Schmitt’s dictum fails to recognize how so-
vereignty is constituted within and by the community that acknowledges
the sovereign as sovereign. Though the sovereign may have the right to
determine the exception to the law (amnesties, for example), and as a re-
sult, stands outside of legal structures, he is never wholly outside of the
community itself.
It is the oft-disparaged court poem, in this instance, that serves as a re-
minder of the essential relationship between sovereign power and the
constitutive imagination of the political community. The practice of
composing matching poems within the court, between the emperor and
his courtiers, was never simply an idle medieval pastime. Underlying the
longstanding imputations of cultural insignificance was a more basic sov-
ereign logic, one that was born in the dialectic between the imperial po-
etic thesis and the praising courtiers’ responses. It was in these leisurely
cultural practices that both the imaginary space of the court was consti-
tuted and the imperial author was himself authored. Sovereign and court
—————
7. Lincoln, Authority, p. 5.
8. Schmitt, Political Theology, p. 5. Despite the fascist origins of this line of thinking, it has continued to be influential even for theorists on the left. See, most prominently, Agamben, Homo Sacer.
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Conclusion
381
were mutually invented through epideictic recognition—the utterance of
praise giving political ontology to the praising “I” and the praised “you.” If
the court poem suffered aesthetically from repetition and conformity, it
was because its standards were based upon a poetic competence that
sought not individual aesthetic expression, but rather the continuing pro-
duction and reproduction of the imperial imaginary.
If neither Lincoln, writing from the political left, nor Schmitt, writing
from the political right, recognizes the implication of the sovereign within
the claims of his own sovereignty, it is because their accounts of political
ideology do not allow for sovereign interiority or its inherent self-
contradictions. Particularly for Schmitt, sovereignty is totalizing and total;
the sovereign is always the subject and is never subjected. Yet we have seen how the sovereign was subject to a complex of cultural codes and tensions,
some self-imposed and others imposed from the discursive history of sov-
ereignty. In imperial poems, the emperor not only represented himself as
the source and embodiment of authority in the empire, but also as the
heir to a longer, preexisting history of imperial models. This tension be-
tween what the emperor wanted to claim for himself and what he inher-
ited as past claims of sovereignty illustrated the central paradox of what
Stephen Greenblatt has termed self-fashioning.
At the same time, imperial poetry revealed the underlying contradic-
tions of the imperial person, which is to say, the imperial persona. It was
in the writing of poetry that the sovereign could question the very nature
of the imperial role and express what could otherwise not be expressed in
the public genres of edict and speech—including the thought, as voiced
by Han Gaozu, that the emperor might not always want to be emperor.
As Ernst Kantorowicz has pointed out, the king was both body politic
and body natural, a juridical distinction that was meant to explain the
conjoined duality of the royal person but also served to emphasize the
split in identity that no ruler could avoid. Of course, the ideal sovereign,
as he was constructed within Chinese political discourse, was supposed to
embody the empire without reserve, to embrace the body politic and not
remain wedded to his private self.
Poetry, however, had its own logic and freedoms, and it would be in
this discursive realm that the poetic subject and the imperial persona
would come into tension. In many of Taizong’s poems, we find the thema-
tization of this problematic split within sovereign subjectivity, bringing in-
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382
Conclusion
to relief the complexities of voice in the speaking subject who was both em-
peror and poet. Where we find Taizong pulling back from a moment of po-
etic seduction, we see how the roles of the poet and the sovereign do not
quite align, how there are fracture lines between the two identities that
cannot be sutured. The resolution that he almost always finds by the close
of the poem does not entirely do away with the psychomachia that leads
him to choose a virtuous self-representation, but is indeed enriched and
nuanced by these seeming moments of doubt and contradiction.
On this point, I return to my earlier claim that imperial poetry should
not be viewed simply as political legitimation, but has to be taken seri-
ously as poetry. Taizong himself knew the value of poetry even though he
; felt obliged to dismiss it from time to time. His attempt to found a style
of poetry that would be commensurate to the grandeur of the newly uni-
fied dynasty would lead him to yoke poetry to the moral significance of
history and the canonical legacy of the sage-kings. Thus, from his lesser
“poems on things” to his more ambitious poetic compositions, we find
repeated and layered allusions to classical and historical texts. This density
of allusion is more than an investment in cultural capital; it is a filiation to
the past, a claim of sagely restoration, or at least, of an inheritance of the
sages’ legacy.
Yet if this were all that Taizong sought to accomplish in writing poetry,
we would have a body of serious-minded, but ultimately unreadable, exer-
cises in didacticism. What we have instead in Taizong’s literary corpus is a
conscious, even self-reflective, working out of the problems of poetic sig-
nificance. In his crowning achievement, “The Imperial Capital Poems,”
Taizong passes through a catalogue of imperial pleasures before reassert-
ing the propriety of moral kingship. The emperor’s roaming ( you)
through the imperial palace grounds on a single day of leisure becomes as
much textual as it is physical, since Taizong roams from descriptions of
Confucian leisure, to the sensual delights of Han rhapsody and southern
courtly poetic topics, and back to the meditation on history and ritual.
That is, Taizong’s representation of physical leisure is always underpinned
by texts that he has read, and the poetic scenes unfold as commentaries on
his readings. In this way, corporeal pleasure is translated into something
unmistakably textual, into the pleasure of literature itself.
The imperial body, which was the site of much concern throughout
political and historical writings, can also thus be resolved. The closing
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Conclusion
383
lines of “The Imperial Capital Poems” depict Taizong as attending to the
inheritance of “the Yun and Ting echoes.” If the ritual performances of
Qin Shihuang and Han Wudi were carried out in order to allow corpo-
real pleasures to continue forever, to realize auxetic desire, Taizong’s re-