Confronting the Tang

Those critical of Huang Tingjian's use of prior verse attack him for robbing the original poet, ruining the purity of the original verse, and calling this concoction art. To bolster their claim that what Huang saw as an act of poetic revision actually was one of violent piracy, they attribute to Huang the particular motive of pride and cite this passage:

My mind has become drunk on the Classic of Poetry and the Chuci. I feel as though I have obtained something from them, yet I will forever be behind the men of antiquity. As for discoursing on words today, we should let Shaoyou [Qin Guan, 1049-1001, Chao [Buzhi, 1053-1110], Zhang [Lei, 1054-1114], and Wuji [Chen Shidao, 1053-1101] do it. You may ask one or two of these four gentlemen about the subject.

In days past Wang Zhifang [1069-1109] composed two pieces in the style of the Chuci and sent them to me. They seem to be presentable. I once told him that [composition] is analogous to the situation of craftswomen of today — their patterned weaving is the marvel of a whole generation. When they plan to make a piece, it is proper for them to study the mechanism behind weaving [i.e., the loom]. Then and only then are they able to form brocade. You should try out this thought [in taking on your literary endeavor).

Every discussion of this passage I have found uses Huang Tingjian's pronouncement as evidence of his deep discontent over his belatedness. The critics, however, tend to note only the first section, but in an important way the second part suggests Huang's reaction to the condition of belatedness articulated in the first. Huang remarks that he has grasped something from the most ancient anthologies of poetry but admits his inability to close the gap between the ancients and himself. He refers the addressee of this letter to the members of the group of scholars around Su Shi, who he says are better able to explicate words, but this moment of self-confessed inadequacy may be taken as signaling a will to go beyond antiquity. Huang leaves behind the question of recuperating the language of antiquity and turns to another matter.

Huang's analogy, likening literary composition to weaving, may be an allegory for one of the chief components of the late Northern Song project: the effort not to recuperate the past but to correlate present-day action with what latter-day literati understood to be the intent behind the ancient texts. Huang does not praise the weavers of his day for imitating ancient patterns and motifs; rather, he focuses on a more basic, and more essential, matter: the tools of the craft. In like fashion, Huang is interested in exploring the tools of literary art in order to produce literature that will dazzle his age. He is interested less in seeking out the precise etymologies of words in an effort to revive their original meaning than in learning how to join words in particular constructs that engender new meanings.

Huang's remarks shift the focus from restoring the past to composing texts based on a particular understanding of those models: we might even infer that this understanding is the "something" Huang has obtained from the classics. In his poetry Huang transforms the curse of belatedness into an imperative to create something different based on a particular understanding of past art and marks his position as a point of origin for a new poetics. We might correlate this movement away from imitation with the more general situation of late Northern Song poets, specifically their changing relationship to their Tang predecessors.

Arguably, more than any previous age in China, the Northern Song was involved in assessing its relationship to its past. In Song poetry one can sense the presence of a tremendous range of prior texts, but the main focus of late Northern Song poets was the Tang dynasty. Northern Song poets have inevitably been compared, both by later critics and by themselves, to the poets all agree were the finest of any age. The Tang greats drew on a lyric tradition over a millennium old and achieved poetry that perfected centuries-old techniques while losing none of (and indeed, adding much to) the lyrical quality of that verse.

In many ways it was the ill-fortune of Northern Song poets to follow the Tang — any effort by any Song poet was necessarily weighed against the most mature works of the greatest Tang masters. The modern critic Qian Zhongshu cites the opinion of many critics that Song poetry is, in a word, worthless. This opinion is reflected in the minimal inclusion of Song shi (lyric) verse in anthologies of classical Chinese poetry. Indeed, Qian cites one modern anthology that moves from the Tang directly to the Ming, bypassing entirely the Five Dynasties, Song, and Yuan periods. Another modern critic, Hu Yunyi, goes so far as to claim that shi poetry was completely exhausted by the time of the Northern Song. To compound this crippling situation, the political, aesthetic, and literary realms were all, according to Hu, hostile to the development of chi.

It was not until the Qing dynasty that interest in Song poetry was revived by such men as Qian Qianyi (1582-1664) and Huang Zongxi (1610-9;) and that Song poetry was again considered seriously. But even then the relative value of Song poetry was hotly debated; the established view was still deeply entrenched in literary opinion. The main issues are outlined in the preface to an important anthology of Song verse compiled in the Qing dynasty, the Song shi chao:

From the time of the Jia[qing; 1522-67] and the Long[qing; 1567-73] reigns, critics of poetry have revered the Tang while dismissing the Song, seeing the poetry collections of Song poets as fit for only "covering the sauce jar" or for "papering a wall."

... Those who today dismiss Song poetry have yet to truly see a Song poem [since what has been handed down is biased]. Even though they may have seen a Song poem, they are incapable of assessing its origin and ramifications, and this is no different from not seeing it at all.

The flaw actually resides not so much in dismissing the Song as it does in revering the Tang. Probably what is revered is what those of the Jiaqing reign period and later regarded as "Tang" and not what the men of the Tang and Song eras conceived of as the Tang. Therefore, it follows that if what critics construe as the "Tang" is not the Tang as it was regarded at that time, then neither is their notion of what is "Song" accurate, and thus their assumption that it is decadent is quite understandable.

The Song was close in time to the Tang, and the Song poets' made great efforts to learn from the Tang and became particularly refined and...