Organizer: Yang Ye, University of California, Riverside
Chair: Michael A. Fuller, University of California, Irvine
Discussant: Jonathan Pease, Portland State University
Wen Tianxiang (1236-1283), who led a losing war defending the Southern Song regime against the invading Mongols and died as a martyr after years in captivity, was primarily remembered as a national hero and loyalist. He was among the earliest to be introduced to the West as one of "The Makers of Cathay," and his poem "Ode to the Noble Spirit" (Zheng qi ge) is among only a few hundred of classical Chinese poems which has been given many renditions in various European languages. A prolific writer notwithstanding, Wen Tianxiang's achievements as a poet in his own right largely stay in the shade of his reputation as a historical figure. The papers in this panel consider Wen Tianxiang's place in literary and cultural history from several different angles. In what ways can we appreciate Wen Tianxiang's poetry in terms of "continuity and mutation" (Liu Xie's tong bian)? How should his shi and ci poetry be evaluated in comparison to that of his contemporaries? How should Wen Tianxiang, as a man of letters, be situated in the thirteenth-century cultural context in his views of poetry and his positions on the dao xue? And how do these relate to his actual poetic practice? The panel attempts to explore these questions using aesthetic and cultural approaches as well as explication du texte.
Writing Poetry as Diary: Wen Tianxiang's Poem Series
Yuan-fang Tung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
A major event recounted in the third juan of Wen Tianxiang's Zhinanlu (Pointing South) is his flight to Yangzhou, which is primarily featured in three poem series: "The Escape from Jingkou," "Out of Zhenzhou," and "Arriving at Yangzhou." Here, Wen chose the heptasyllabic jueju rather than the pentasyllabic gushi, more frequently adopted as the form for such narrative account, especially by the eminent Du Fu. Each of these series was written in a progressive sequence of many poems, together with corresponding prose notes, to chronicle his daily events. This poem series serves as an alternative form to history writing, and as a way (like a diary) to record the part Wen himself played in the cataclysmic drama of the fall of the state. The poetic image of Yangzhou as created in Wen's poem series, with its strong sense of immediacy, is in sharp contrast to the image in retrospection and introspection that was established by the Tang poets, developed by Du Mu, and culminated in Jiang Kui's lyric songs (ci). The prose notes do not simply repeat the contents of the poems, but rather work in a subtle collaboration with the verse to emphasize the melody of the theme. The reader can almost sense the author's desperation of having had to write down all the details as much as he could lest they be forgotten, and his urge to express his feelings to their fullest, because only in the act of writing would his own life be confirmed and defined.
"Writ in Blood": Wen Tianxiang's Lyric Songs
Yang Ye, University of California, Riverside
With those included in the Zhinanlu and those attributed to him (of controversial authorship) combined, there are only fewer than a dozen lyric songs (ci) under Wen Tianxiang's name; yet Wang Guowei (1877-1927), a major canon setter of the genre, acclaimed them as "sublime in wind and bone (feng gu)" and "far superior" to the works of some of Wen's contemporaries. This paper attempts to find ways to understand and appreciate Wen Tianxiang's lyric songs not only through close reading of the major texts in their biographical and historical contexts, but also in the light of Liu Xie's theory of "wind and bone" and the criteria of evaluation set by Wang Guowei, who cited Nietzsche's saying that of all literature, what he held dearest to his heart were those that the author wrote "in his own blood." Some comparison between Wen Tianxiang and other lyric song masters of the end of the Southern Song, especially the three singled out by Wang Guowei in contrast to Wen Tianxiang-Jiang Jie, Zhang Yan and Zhou Mi, will serve to illustrate Wen's affiliation to, and influence from, his predecessors, and the place of his lyric songs in the tradition.
Intellectual and Aesthetic Contexts for Wen Tianxiang's Poetry
Michael A. Fuller, University of California, Irvine
Poetry is not a spontaneous outpouring of emotions; instead, many layers of biographical, historical, and cultural contexts simultaneously mediate and potentiate poetic composition. Wen Tianxiang's poems contained in the Zhinanlu are justly famous, but their origins beyond the immediate historical occasions are quite intricate. Wen's father, for example, strictly trained his son and was broadly learned in the classics, histories, and belles lettres, as well as in astronomy, geomancy, and medicine. Wen then studied under Ouyang Shoudao, usually considered a follower of Zhu Xi; yet Wen filiated him to a very different tradition, that of Ouyang Xiu, Shoudao's ancestor. Wen in turn was a dao xue advocate, yet his positions were complex: he honored Zhu Xi and the Cheng brothers but had little patience with their more theoretical speculations. Moreover, despite this stress on the dao xue moral norms, his approach to poetry showed little of the dao xue suspicion toward the aesthetic; Wen's early poetry in fact displays almost the entire range of styles available at the end of the Southern Song. This paper explores the relationship between Wen Tianxiang's late poetry and the main intellectual and cultural crosscurrents of his day.