The Poetics of Sovereignty
Page 3
太宗皇帝龍鳳之姿，天文秀發，延覽英賢，首倡斯道。其《幸慶善
宮》等作時已被之管絃。明良滿庭，賡歌贊治。19
Gao Bing’s placement of Taizong at the start of his commentary implic-
itly identifies the emperor as the ancestor of Tang poetic history. Little is
said about the content of Taizong’s verse. What we see here is the conven-
—————
15. Hu Zhenheng, comp., Tangyin tongqian, 1.1b–2.13b.
16. See Quan Tang wen, 4.46a–10.131b.
17. Quan Tang shi, 1.1–20. See also Wilhelm and Knechtges, “T’ang T’ai-tsung’s Poetry,” p.
2, n8. Wilhelm and Knechtges note the relevant textual corrections in Tong Peiji, “Chu Tang shi chongchu zhenbian” pp. 195–96. For Tong’s larger study of mistakes in the Quan Tang shi, see his Quan Tang shi chongchu wushou kao. Also see the study of errors in Chen Shangjun, “Quan Tang shi wushou shi kao” in Tangdai wenxue congkao, pp. 1–60.
18. The phrase zanzhi 贊治 was first used in the Zhou li 周禮 ( Rites of Zhou), describing the duties of the shi 史 (“scribes,” here, the sixth of eight categories of governmental officials): “they were occupied with writing in order to aid in administration” 掌官書以贊治.
See Zhou li zhushu, 3.17c, in Shisanjing zhushu, p. 655. I have consulted the translation in Biot, trans., Le Tcheou-li, vol. 1, p. 60.
19. Gao Bing, comp., Tang shi pinhui, 1371.3b–4a.
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Introduction
7
tional idealized image of the Zhenguan reign, though one in which offi-
cials not only aid in government, but also participate in the group compo-
sition of poetry at the imperial court.
An equally forthright statement of praise was made by the Ming
scholar Du Mu 都穆 (1459–1525), who, in his Nanhao shihua 南濠詩話
( Poetry Talks of Master Nanhao), commented specifically on Taizong’s
best-known composition, “The Imperial Capital Poems: Ten Pieces with
Preface” 帝京篇十首并序:
All of these [Taizong’s] works possess heroic greatness and are not of the com-
mon sort; their scope is vast and far-reaching. One can truly call them the com-
positions of an emperor—they are not something that a Confucian scholar or
versifier could equal.
皆雄偉不群，規模宏遠。真可謂帝王之作，非儒生騷人之所能及。20
Du Mu believes that “The Imperial Capital Poems” successfully capture
the emperor’s grand personality and achievements, thus concluding that
the poems could only have been written by an emperor. This statement
indicates an awareness of the imperial voice or at least a sense of imperial
aura that emanates from the poems. Of course, the problem of such a
claim lies in the circularity of its logic: as Taizong was an emperor, one
reads the poems as possessed of an imperial aura; one feels an imperial
aura in the poems because Taizong was an emperor. Moreover, Du Mu
focuses his attention upon poems that match his expectation of how an
emperor should write, and ignores the many court-style poems that would
have complicated this assessment.
The conservative Ming critic Wang Shizhen 王世貞 (1526–90), on
the other hand, would take these courtly poems into consideration, and
argue the opposite in his Yiyuan zhiyan 藝苑卮言 ( Careless Talk from the
Garden of Arts):
Tang Wenhuang [Taizong] pacified with his own hands the Central Plain, con-
quering an entire age; however, his poetry and language rather lacks a masculine
disposition, employing deep-rooted habits [of the Southern Dynasties]. . . . “The
Imperial Capital Poems” alone are acceptable, but besides that, [the other poems]
cannot avoid flowery embellishment; it can be said that in regard to the distant
past, [Taizong’s poems] are inferior to those of Han Wudi [漢武帝 (r. 141–87
—————
20. See Wu Wenzhi, gen. ed., Ming shihua quanbian, vol. 2, pp. 1750–51.
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8
Introduction
bc)] and in regard to the near past, they suffer in comparison to Cao Cao [曹操
(155–220)].
唐文皇手定中原，壓蓋一世，而詩語殊無丈夫氣，習使之也 ... 《帝京
篇》可耳，餘者不免花草點綴，可謂遠遜漢武，近輸曹公。21
Wang Shizhen dismisses Taizong’s poetry for its stylistic reliance on the
southern courtly style, comparing Taizong unfavorably to earlier imperial
poets. Wang agrees that although “The Imperial Capital Poems” are
praiseworthy, this is the exception, not the rule.
Modern critics have continued to debate the merits of Taizong’s po-
etry. Perhaps most famously, Mao Zedong 毛澤東 dismissed the literary
worth of Taizong (along with three other rulers) in his 1936 poem, “To
the Tune of ‘Spring in Princess Qin’s Orchard’: Snow” 沁園春：雪. The
relevant couplet reads: “It’s a pity that the Qin First Emperor [Qin Shi-
huang 秦始皇 (r. 221-210 bc)] and Han Wudi were rather lacking in lit-
erary ornament / And Tang Taizong and Song Taizu were quite inferior
in poetic composition” 惜秦皇漢武略輸文采，唐宗宋祖稍遜風騷.22
Of course, Mao’s opinion here was self-serving, since the dispraise of these
towering emperors of the past was meant to direct praise to himself. In a
more objective manner, scholars such as Stephen Owen and Tang Guiren
湯貴仁 have sought to place Taizong (and early Tang poetry in general) in
the literary historical context of the reception of the Southern Dynasties’
courtly style.23 Indeed, this approach can be said to characterize the general
tendency of modern critical assessments of Taizong’s writings.24
Departing to some extent from these approaches, I will instead re-
evaluate the traditional reception of early Tang literary history by com-
plementing the diachronic approach of historical influence and revision-
ism with a more synchronic understanding of how imperial court poetry
functioned in the operations of sovereignty and cultural ideology. As such,
I hope that this will be a contribution to the literary history of the medie-
—————
21. See Wu Wenzhi, gen. ed., Ming shihua quanbian, vol. 4, p. 4235.
22. In Mao Zedong shici ji, p. 75.
23. See Stephen Owen, The Poetry of the Early T’ang, pp. 42–59; and Tang Guiren, “Lun Chu Tang shige de lishi diwei,” pp. 53–68.
24. For example, see Yu Meiyun, “Lun Tang Taizong shi,” pp. 55–67; Yang Shiming,
Tangshi shi, pp. 8–23; Liu Kaiyang, Tangshi tonglun, pp. 31–42; and Zhang Zongyuan, Tangshi qianshuo, pp. 72–78.
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Introduction
9
val period, as well as a broader inquiry into the political and intellectual
culture at the start of the second great empire.
Even though Taizong’s literary collection is not vast, particularly when
compared to later Tang literary collections, I confine mys
elf to the trans-
lation and explication of only a modest number of his compositions. This
is because my approach throughout this volume will be to contextualize
Taizong’s writings through discussions of the historical, intellectual, and
literary milieux in which they were produced. Taizong’s writings are
dense with allusions, necessitating a kind of “thick description” (to bor-
row Clifford Geertz’s phrase) that explains not only what Taizong is try-
ing to articulate, but also how his statements trope on earlier statements.25
In order to provide sufficiently full analyses of these contexts, I have lim-
ited myself to what I see as the most significant of Taizong’s poems and
other writings, and perhaps more to the point, those that best illustrate
his interest in the literary representation of sovereignty.
Taizong’s choice of allusions is significant, even where the allusions can
be taken as poetic or cultural commonplaces. However, it should be noted
that, contrary to this position, Denis Twitchett has argued that many of
Taizong’s quotations tended not to be intentional allusions but examples
of “literary cliché,” “the provenance of which was half forgotten.”26 This
might be true in some cases, though there is here a broader critical prob-
lem of intentionality versus textuality to consider. Twitchett frames the
problem through an assumption of authorial intentionality, asking how
we can determine whether an allusion is mere literary commonplace or
conscious troping. While I do not dismiss the importance of authorial in-
tention (as have many critical theorists implicitly or explicitly), my own
approach is more strongly informed by the theory of cultural intertextual-
ity, which does not admit a clear distinction between commonplace and
trope. Both commonplace and trope belong to what might be called the
“unconscious intelligence” of language, which is layered and compounded
over the history of discourse.27 Authorial intention provides only part of
the picture in the process of literary signification, since language never be-
longs solely to the individual speaker, but rather is a shared medium with
—————
25. See Geertz, “Thick Description,” pp. 3–30.
26. See Twitchett, “How to Be an Emperor, p. 96.
27. Here see Frow, “Intertextuality and Ontology,” pp. 45–55.
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10
Introduction
a long underlying history of usage. What I hope to demonstrate is both
how Taizong inherited a discourse on sovereignty (and as such, was an
unconscious participant in a historical linguistic and cultural community)
and how he transformed the inherited discourse.
Finally, before turning to a synopsis of the present study, I would like
to acknowledge my debt to the modern annotated edition of Taizong’s
extant literary collection by the scholars Wu Yun 吳雲 and Ji Yu 冀宇.
This is the Tang Taizong quanji jiaozhu 唐太宗全集校注 ( The Complete
Literary Collection of Tang Taizong, with Collated Annotations).28 I have
relied heavily on this work for my own research and benefited greatly
from the convenience of having all of Taizong’s writings collected in one
volume with annotations.
•
This volume is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter provides a
historical overview of Taizong’s reign, focusing on key events that inform
his writings or are thematized in them. Whereas previous studies on
Taizong’s reign have treated the traditional historical sources as relatively
transparent sources of information, I combine narrative discussion of the
reign with attention to the historiographic process and with more de-
tailed cultural analyses of Taizong’s actions. What becomes clear from a
close reading of the sources is how the representation of Taizong as an
ideal sovereign has its basis in the historical accounts of his reign. The sec-
ond chapter delves more deeply into the relationship between representa-
tion and sovereignty by examining Taizong’s own political writings and
speeches. I devote some attention to the debates on sovereignty that were
held at the outset of the reign, though the primary focus of the chapter is
a close reading of Taizong’s two major essays on rulership. These essays
bookended his reign, with the first composed shortly after his accession
and the second near the end of his life. As such, they offer a remarkable
glimpse of the second Tang emperor’s own political thinking and concep-
tion of the imperial role.
The third chapter turns from the discussion of Taizong’s more public
writings to examine the place of literature during the Zhenguan reign. I
frame Taizong’s own comments on literature by tracing the history of the
—————
28. An earlier edition was published by the same editors as Tang Taizong ji.
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Introduction
11
relationship between literary thought and sovereign ideology from the
Han dynasty through the Sui, and then take up the question of how lit-
erature was conceived by Taizong and his court. While Taizong did not
author his own treatise on literature, he did involve himself in the writing
and compilation of the Jin shu, for which he composed an essay on the
poet Lu Ji 陸機 (261–303). Moreover, a handful of anecdotes provide
some evidence of his thoughts on poetry, as well as how he understood the
practice of poetic composition in relation to his identity as emperor. This
intersection between poetic and imperial identity becomes the subject of
the fourth chapter, which introduces the subgenre of imperial poetry—
that is, poetry composed by (or attributed to) emperors. I discuss how a
tradition of earlier poet-emperors informed and shaped the rhetorical
templates of Taizong’s own poetic compositions, and trace through a lit-
erary genealogy of imperial poets, ending with a reading of selected poems
by Taizong that trope on the earlier poems and poets. Here, I demon-
strate how Taizong’s poetic works could be interpreted as assertions of
sovereign identity, which filiate him to particular earlier rulers while dif-
ferentiating him from others.
A very different kind of literary genealogy is discussed in the fifth
chapter, in which I explore the idea of court poetry and the imagination
of the imperial court. As in the previous chapter, I begin with a diachronic
perspective by analyzing a common court literary theme (poems on snow)
from the Southern Dynasties to the early Tang. Court poems are, for the
most part, devoid of individual sensibilities, since the purpose of courtly
composition was to demonstrate literary competence and adherence to
social norms. The stylistic changes in this set of poems on one topic
thereby provide a way of understanding how dynastic literary trends and
modes might have changed over time, ending
with an examination of how
Taizong conceived of the courtly style that he had inherited from the
Southern Dynasties. I then turn to a synchronic perspective with a discus-
sion of a very different set of poems by Taizong and his courtiers, one that
commemorates an early Tang military victory. Here, I show how group
composition operated within the imperial court, beginning with Taizong’s
piece and then discussing how the other five pieces echo and revisit
themes introduced by Taizong.
The sixth chapter focuses on one of Taizong’s rhapsodies, a piece on
the Daming Palace 大明宮, which was begun under Taizong as a palace
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12
Introduction
for his ailing, heat-stricken father but never completed. While a significant
part of the chapter is given over to a translation and discussion of the piece,
I contextualize my argument by examining the historical reception of pal-
ace-building and the broader question of sovereign expenditures. Here, a
number of important concerns for the theory of sovereignty emerge, many
of which center on the problem of imperial desire and corporeality. I show
how the palace, which stands as the architectural symbol of sovereign
power, also becomes the symbol of unrestrained imperial appetite.
In the seventh and final chapter, I examine “The Imperial Capital Po-
ems,” which comprise the first Tang poem-cycle and stand as Taizong’s
best-known composition. “The Imperial Capital Poems” are of particular
importance because they (along with the attached preface, also by
Taizong) serve as Taizong’s most realized poetic statement on the idea of
sovereignty, bringing into a certain coherence the various other gestures
and thoughts concerning sovereignty that inform his other writings. In
the course of the ten poems, Taizong depicts a day of leisure from his im-
perial duties within his palace grounds. However, this representation of
leisure echoes a number of problems that also underlie his rhapsody on