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Citation, Allusion and Intertexuality in Medieval Chinese Literature
Organizer: Wendy Swartz, Columbia University
Chair: Pauline Yu, ACLS
Discussant: David C. Schaberg, UCLA and Michael Puett, Harvard University
It is difficult to overstate the fruitful impact the concept of intertexuality has had on the field of literary studies over the past few decades. A term coined by Julia Kristeva and a concept theorized by Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, and Harold Bloom among many others, intertexuality permeates and affects all texts, whether it be broadly envisioned as an engagement with cultural codes and expressions or more specifically viewed as the interrelation with another text or a body of texts. Intertexuality has special significance and ramifications for the Chinese literary tradition, in light of the relative stability and continuity of the literary language, the accessibility of the literary corpus, and a pervasive, faithful subscription to past models. Curiously, however, while citation and allusion were central to Chinese poetics, these issues have rarely been problematized. This panel brings together three papers that will examine these issues from different vantage points. Wendy Swartz’s paper discusses Tao Yuanming’s citations of the Zhuangzi in the context of the prevalent Six Dynasties poetic practice of citing abstruse philosophy (xuan xue). Paula Varsano’s paper treats Chinese landscape as an intertexual space that is continually re-written and a crucial factor in the shaping of poetic subjectivity during the Tang. Robert Ashmore’s paper examines the “zither songs” (qin cao) tradition as the site of a significant but understudied intertextual link between scriptural texts and lyrical texts and performance.
Tao Yuanming’s Citations of the Zhuangzi in Context
Wendy Swartz, Columbia University
It is well known that allusions and textual citations played a crucial role in traditional Chinese poetry. These devices enable a text to display knowledge and/or appreciation of the past and, more fundamentally, they bespeak a certain functionality, i.e. they amplify a poem of limited characters by referencing extra-textual associations and larger systems of signification. Yet the ways in which these devices function in Chinese poetry have rarely been conceptualized and fruitfully examined in practice. Six Dynasties poems offer particularly interesting examples of textual citation: the “three abstruse” (san xuan) texts (Yijing, Laozi, and Zhuangzi), which formed the core of early medieval Chinese thought, are cited throughout poetic œuvres of the era. Abstruse poetry (xuanyan shi), in vogue during the fourth century, frequently culled phrases and images from the three abstruse texts, and Xie Lingyun’s representative landscape poetry incorporates Yijing citations into the conceptual and structural framework of its mode of presentation. This paper will focus on Tao Yuanming’s citations of the Zhuangzi, one of the most oft-cited texts in his œuvre, by examining how these citations function within the text both semantically and structurally and by contextualizing them in the larger trend of citing abstruse philosophy. Rather than treat these citations as proof that Tao Yuanming was more or less Daoist than Confucian, the usual critical approach to this issue, I propose to probe the ways in which philosophical trends influenced and became integrated into the development of poetic practices during medieval China.
Authority and Performance: The Qin Cao Tradition
Robert Ashmore, University of California, Berkeley
The early medieval qin cao or “zither song” tradition, of which the best-preserved early examples appear in a set attributed to the Eastern Han writer and polymath Cai Yong (132–192), is not typically given much prominence in accounts of the literary or cultural history of the period. The qin cao, however, whether we conceive it as a performance mode or as a literary genre, provides a valuable window into the relations between “authorities” (both textual and personal) of the past and ongoing literary and musical expression during the period, and also reminds us of the often submerged links between medieval lyric and cognate activities in areas such as ritual, drama, and scriptural interpretation. Each qin cao song takes the form of a short “aria” set in the voice of a sage from the past (Confucius and early Zhou sages are particularly well represented in the repertoire) as that figure encounters a moment of crisis. The songs thus present themselves as the ipsissima verba actually uttered by the sage in the moment, such that to perform the song is to adopt the voice of the sage, and the sage is viewed as the song’s first performer. The implications of this model are central and long-lived ones within traditional Chinese education and literary culture. The present paper will close by looking at one of the more direct literary legacies of the early medieval qin cao, the suite of qin cao composed by the mid-Tang literatus and cultural reformer Han Yu (768–824).
Do You See What I See?: Intertextual Landscape and the Formation of the Tang Lyric Subject
Paula Varsano, University of California, Berkeley
Lu Ji (261-303), in the preface to his poignant “Rhapsody on Poetry,” expresses distress at the daunting prospect of accurately perceiving the world laid out before his eyes, and then, just as accurately, conveying that world in a poem. This confession, which lies at the heart of subsequent Chinese poets’ perennial preoccupation with establishing the essential inseparability of “feeling” and “scene” in lyric poetry, tells only part of the story of how the depiction of a scene would come to be read as an expression of poetic subjectivity. Another part of that story is embedded, albeit with considerably less anxiety, in Lu Ji’s references to the role that received literature plays in the creative process. Lu Ji urges poets to draw amply from the “word-hoard” received from yet earlier poets; yet, he never confronts the question of how the internalized writings of past poets interact with, and even mediate, the poet’s perceptions of the natural world. But, over the course of the ensuing centuries through the High Tang, something intriguing occurs: while Lu Ji’s critical successors are beginning to emphasize the primacy of the poet’s subjective response to the perceived natural world, the Chinese landscape itself is becoming increasingly overwritten by poets and the history they transmit. This confluence of tendencies was apparently not conceived of as oppositional; and this raises the questions that will form the focus of this paper. First, in what sense can a highly intertextual landscape be “seen” and “contemplated”? Second, what does this conception of perception reveal about the nature of poetic subjectivity as manifested in the poetry of the High Tang?