Referentiality and Authority

Referentiality and culturally determined signification within a text or other system of discourse has been a longstanding topic of research in semiotics and sociological anthropology, areas of study that have spanned many decades and volumes. My approach to the four texts analyzed in this chapter is basically semiotic; in each text I collect incidences of certain types of signification whose meaning depends on reference within a particular textual code. Although the texts I have chosen are all "autobiographies" according to the guidelines established in the preface, they should not be taken as representative of premodern Chinese autobiographies or as attempts to indicate and discuss the history of Chinese autobiography. Even though there is no classification for autobiographies in the Siku quanshu nor any body of literature Chinese scholars regard as autobiography, there are hundreds of texts—zizhuan, zishu, and zixu as well as diaries, journals, travelogues, poetry, confessions, and self-admonishments—which should be discussed in a comprehensive or even preliminary history of autobiography. My thesis in this chapter is that among premodern autobiographies there are a number of texts which, if categorized according to signifying referents, fall into my two main categories of "circumstantial," in which the author refers primarily to his social and material circumstances, defining the self by its relationship to institutions and structures that signify status and power and locating the self physically within places identified with common, socially accepted names; and "impressionistic," in which the writer attempts definition through identification with an atemporal, intertextual tradition that suppresses reference to the temporally and spatially organized world of ancestry and position, substituting instead references to the leisured life of the literati. Within the text the writer is positing a definition of the intellectual self and its role in society which will differ radically depending on the type of autobiography he chooses to employ. The following examples, two of which are clearly circumstantial and two of which are equally as clearly impressionistic, indicate that whereas the denigration of textual labor common in modern writer's autobiographies does not exist in these premodern works, the self of the intellectual has been constructed in at least two very dissimilar ways. The individual intellectual in the circumstantial autobiography is formed through textual affiliation with society's present and past affairs, whereas the intellectual of the impressionistic autobiography is distinguished through a textual construction of a life of withdrawal from affairs and association with literary pursuits. Thus the split between an intellectual determined through affiliation with textual work as opposed to social (or, in modern times, physical) labor, which is so plainly displayed in the modern autobiography, is not solely a modern ideology.

The circumstantial autobiography is a textual construction that relies on reference to ancestry, position, locale, and status, creating an intellectual figure that is firmly entrenched within the signifying institutions of society. This is the bulk of the orthodox tradition of official biography, although many early biographies contain a brief character appraisal at the end. The impressionistic autobiography eschews this orientation, instead substituting for it the figure of the somewhat reclused, leisured literatus who spends his time reading and writing poetry and discussing literature with his friends over a bottle of wine. This also becomes an orthodox tradition, although it is not common in official biography. Both are wenren, but each draws on a specific aspect of the wenren tradition in self-definition.

Although the impressionistic autobiography refers to a more exclusively literary code of poetry, discussion of writing, and the general existence of an intellectual whose time is taken up with literary endeavors, it is not in itself a more "literary" document than the circumstantial text. Only the referents, which are the only segment of the text relevant to this study, are more exclusively literary, not the style or even the author. Thus the "literary code" is not just writing or literary writing, but includes reference to various components of the life-style of a nonsocially engaged literatus.

Sima Qian: The Prototypical Circumstantial Autobiography

One of the earliest known autobiographies in China, that of the historian Sima Qian, consists of the seventieth chapter of his Shiji (Records of the grand historian). Like many autobiographical essays that follow, this text is appended to or included in the main text as an explanation of the questions which surround the text itself: the author's reasons for writing it and the circumstances of its existence. A reason not given in the text yet discernible in its progression is Sima Qian's desire to defend himself and his actions in a story well-known to Chinese historians. When he championed the cause of the general Li Ling, who surrendered to the Xiongnu rather than follow the established practice of fighting to the death, Emperor Wu of the Han ordered Sima to chose between castration or death; in order to finish the work of the Shiji, he chose castration. Thus the autobiography is a vindication of the self and an attempt to validate his text even though historical record has called into question his authority both as representative and transmitter of orthodox morality. As such the text is an attempt to fix or define the identity of the self with relation to what the writer regards as the context of its emergence.

At the beginning of his translation of the Shiji, Burton Watson inserts this note: "Following custom, Sima Qian begins his account with a genealogy of his family, tracing it back, as is the wont of Chinese writers, to the golden ages of the legendary past". The custom to which he refers is that of biography, which begins the life of the individual in the distant past, placing him in a temporal sequence in which his life appears as simply a moment along the way. Sima Qian conforms with this tradition by reciting a brief genealogy which becomes somewhat lengthier as it arrives at the life of his father, Sima Tan, who was the Grand Historian before him. The "Discussion of the Essentials of the Six Schools" is an essay by his father that details his father's ideas on the various philosophic schools of the time.

When he arrives at his own life, Sima Qian deals with the time from his birth up until his entry into government service in one short section:

He had a son named Qian. Qian was born at Longmen. He plowed and pastured on the sunny side of the hills along the River. At the age of ten he could read the old writings. When he was twenty he traveled south to the Yangzi...