by Chen Jack W
—————
161. Stephen Owen has noted how praise poetry often speaks dispraise beneath the surface of courtesy. See Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics, pp. 211–18.
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The Significance of Court Poetry
265
The sense of competition among the five officials is marked in other
ways as well: poetic images are appropriated and rewritten, mistakes cor-
rected, and witty rejoinders issued. This culture of competition is a hall-
mark of medieval court cultures in Europe, as Norbert Elias has argued.
Elias points to how the noblemen of the ancien régime competed within
an economy of prestige, each house attempting to outspend and ruin the
other.162 While Taizong’s court did not seem to have the kind of con-
spicuous prestige consumption that one founds within French court cul-
ture—or, indeed, in the ruinous spending of the estates in the Honglou
meng 紅樓夢 ( A Dream of Red Mansions)—there was no question that
personal prestige was at stake for the medieval Chinese court poet. As
with Xu Jingzong, Shangguan Yi came to Taizong’s attention on the basis
of his literary talent, and not because of familial connections: the histories
record that Taizong “heard of their reputations” 聞其名, and accordingly,
gave them positions in his literary academy. Such poets had to shine dur-
ing the imperial tests of literary composition that were disguised as ban-
quets and other celebrations, particularly because it was skill in poetry
that served as the path to continued success and influence.
On the other hand, the inherent competitiveness of court poetry was
balanced by its singleness of purpose: to praise the sovereign and the im-
perium. Of course, praise was never simply flattery courteously performed;
rather, it was an integral activity of the court, one that shared in the con-
stitutive power of other, more explicitly ritualistic practices such as morn-
ing court, ancestral sacrifices, and even the ordinary observances of eti-
quette. What I mean is perhaps best articulated by Joel Fineman, who has
written: “Praise points here when it points there, and so we grow accus-
tomed to a praising self whose ‘I’ and ‘me’ depend upon their correspon-
dence to a praiseworthy ‘thou’ and ‘thee.’”163 Though the speaking subject
of the praise poem may direct its praise outward, to another person or
thing, the act of praising is also an act of self-recognition that allows the
speaking self to come into being. Moreover, the act of praise ties the self
to the other in the unifying moment of the poem, conjoining emperor
and courtier through the symbolic bond of the matching poem.
—————
162. See Norbert Elias, The Court Society, rpt. in The Collected Works of Norbert Elias, pp.
74–77.
163. Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye, p. 7.
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266
The Significance of Court Poetry
The power of the praise poem may reside in its capacity to imagine the
harmonious unity of the court, where there are, in actuality, only evolving
differentials of power, competitions of prestige and influence, and con-
flicts of interest. That is, despite the very real function of the court in the
governance of the empire, it is an institution whose origins may be located
in the social imaginary, in the collective imagination of the officials who
quite literally may be said to compose the court. The role of the imaginary,
according to Cornelius Castoriadis, is foundational; it orients and situates
the entire production of significance of a given society.164 These six poems
are no less concerned with the production of significance, and if they fo-
cus on a single battle at the Tang founding, they manage to attribute to
that battle a cosmological importance that legitimates, in general, the
moral existence of the Tang imperium, and in particular, the problematic
accession of Taizong and the formation of his court. History is itself re-
written, as the poems provide a more persuasive account of the dynasty’s
foundation through the careful elision of any unwelcome facts and cir-
cumstances that might contradict the narrative that Taizong’s court
wants to tell of itself, the imaginary that undergirds imperial signification.
•
Sovereignty was never solely the province of the political sphere, but rather
was comprised of a complex interweaving of political authority, military
power, and cultural competence. Facility in the composition of courtly po-
etry provided evidence of cultural continuity from dynasty to dynasty, even
when the preceding periods were scorned for political and military weak-
ness. Taizong and his courtiers, consciously or unconsciously, seem to have
understood that the literary practices of the court were the means by which
the violence of the Tang uprising could be sublated into foundational my-
thology. It was, of course, not accidental that this narration of the shift
from wu to wen took place in poetic form, through the most elegant of civilized discourses. The courtly poem, after all, was itself a literal translation of
wu into wen, an inscription of military violence in the literary texts of the court. As such, the poem served as the very embodiment of civil virtue, the
symbolic form of the imaginary, and thus became the very proof of the end
of violence and the renewal of civilization.
—————
164. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, p. 128.
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S I X
Palatial Form and the Rhapsodic
Imagination
There is no question that the rhapsody ( fu 賦) stands alongside the lyric
poem ( shi) as a leading poetic form of the medieval period. Yet, as Paul W.
Kroll has noted, the attention given to shi poetry within the post-Han
Chinese literary tradition has often been at the expense of the fu.1 This is perhaps due in part to the lexical difficulty often associated with fu, as
well as to the determinative logics of literary historical narratives that seek
to identify specific epochs with specific literary genres—or perhaps even
to how aesthetic tastes and conceptions of poetry have been shaped
through critical discourse. However, the rhapsody was important not only
in terms of literary history, but also as the (arguably) primary genre
through which articulations of imperial power were made in the early
days of empire. That is to say, although the lyric poem would stand as a
kind of sacred speech within the ideological imagination of empire, the
rhapsody was a literary form that often dealt much more directly with the
subject and themes of sovereignty, not only from the perspective of impe-
rial representation, but also in terms of the court imaginary.
—————
1. See Kroll, “Significance of the fu,” pp. 87
–105; and his comments on Tang rhapsody in Kroll, “Poetry of the T’ang Dynasty.”
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268
Palatial Form and the Rhapsodic Imagination
Sima Xiangru and the Poetry of Imperial Representation
Such issues were central to the “grand” or “epideictic rhapsody” ( dafu 大
賦), particularly as it developed during the Western Han dynasty. Surviv-
ing early examples of Han rhapsody (and proto-rhapsody) are often
framed by fictional dialogues between a famous rhetor (such as Song Yu),
who would be the rhapsody’s speaker, and a king, who served as the audi-
ence.2 Generally, the dialogue begins with a scene of instruction, with the
king asking the rhetor to expound on a particular topic. In the rhetor’s re-
sponse, one then finds the lengthy exposition on the topic, using tropes
and schemes such as catalogues, parallelism, and lexical obscurity to help
create the illusion of comprehensiveness.3
This fictional relationship between rhetor and king provided a model
for the actual relationship between the rhapsodist and his royal audience.
Despite, however, the precedent of Warring States rulers who patronized
men with literary and sophistical talents, the first Han emperors did not
show any interest in literary men. It was not until the year 135 bc, when
Han Wudi invited the poet Sima Xiangru to Chang’an, that one actually
finds the beginnings of an imperial court literary tradition.4 As David
Knechtges has observed, Wudi “was eager to invite poets, especially fu
writers, to his court.”5 Sima Xiangru came to the emperor’s attention
through his “Rhapsody of Master Emptiness” 子虛賦, which the poet
had composed at the court of Liu Wu 劉武, the King of Liang 梁王. Ac-
cording to the historical records, when Han Wudi chanced to read a copy
of the rhapsody, he cried out, “Will We alone not get to meet this person
—————
2. On proto-rhapsodies and the influence of the early rhetorical tradition, see Knechtges, Han Rhapsody, pp. 12–43.
3. Knechtges has a detailed discussion of rhapsodic rhetoric in Han Rhapsody, pp. 35–38.
4. There are various datings for the arrival of Sima Xiangru at the imperial court. Gong Kechang gives a possible date of 135 bc in his Studies on the Han Fu, p. 135. (This work was originally published in China as Han fu yanjiu.) Yves Hervouet argues that the date could not have been prior to 138 bc, in his Un Poète de cour sous les Han, p. 49, n5. Knechtges argues that Jian Zongwu presents the most convincing case for a date in Jian, “Shanglin fu zhuzuo niandai zhi shangque,” pp. 260–62. See Knechtges, trans., Wen xuan, vol. 2, pp.
73n, 75n.
5. Knechtges, “Emperor and Literature,” p. 53. Also see Long Wenling, Han Wudi yu Xi Han wenxue, pp. 97–142.
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Palatial Form and the Rhapsodic Imagination
269
who shares Our era?” 朕獨不得與此人同時哉.6 More strikingly, how-
ever, when Sima Xiangru arrived at the imperial court, he dismissed this
earlier fu as a matter concerning only the feudal kings, and “requested [the privilege of] composing a fu on the Son of Heaven’s excursions and
hunts” 請為天子游獵之賦.7
While Wudi’s motives in summoning Sima Xiangru were probably
nothing more profound than the desire to act as the patron of an admired
poet, Sima Xiangru’s response to the emperor—and the resulting compo-
sition—would prove to be of critical importance to the history of court
literary culture. The earlier rhapsody centered on the titular Master Emp-
tiness 子虛, an envoy of Chu who is invited to hunt with the king of the
state of Qi. At the end of the Qi royal hunt, Master Emptiness boasts in
exhaustive detail of how the grand hunts of Chu put those of Qi to shame.
The setting of “Zixu fu” is ambiguous, seeming to take place in the age of
hegemonic rivalries between the Eastern Zhou states of Qi and Chu, and
therefore not participating in the Han dynasty’s economies of courtly pa-
tronage. By contrast, the version of the rhapsody that Sima Xiangru pre-
sented to the emperor, later known by the title “Rhapsody on the Impe-
rial Park” 上林賦, would clearly be part of this patronage economy.8 Sima
Xiangru appends a new ending in the voice of another fictional character,
Lord Nonesuch 亡是公, who rebukes Master Emptiness, saying, “you
serve neither to clarify the principle of sovereign and subject, nor to rec-
tify the rites of the feudal lords” 不務明君臣之義，正諸侯之禮.9 Lord
Nonesuch then goes on to describe, in even greater detail, the Son of
Heaven’s grand hunt within the vast preserves of the imperial park. The
poet’s underlying message is that the power and wealth of the Son of
—————
6 . Shi ji, 117.3002; Han shu, 6.2533. The line can also be translated as “Did We alone not get to live in the same era as this person?” though such a rendering does not make sense in this context. There are significant historiographic problems with the account of Sima Xiangru, as Martin Kern points out in his essay, “The ‘Biography of Sima Xiangru.’”
7. Shi ji, 117.3002; Han shu, 6.2533.
8. The textual histories of the “Master Emptiness Rhapsody” and “Rhapsody on the Imperial Park” are rather complex. As Knechtges points out, the Shi ji and Han shu versions of the rhapsody have significant differences. See Knechtges, trans., Wen xuan, or Selections of Refined Literature, vol. 2, p. 55n. Also see Gong, Studies on the Han Fu, pp. 134–38; and Ma Jigao, Fu shi, pp. 75–76.
9. Wen xuan, 1.361. Also see Knechtges, trans., Wen xuan or Selections of Refined Literature, vol. 2, p. 75; and Hervouet, trans., Le Chapitre 117 du Che-ki, p. 56.
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270
Palatial Form and the Rhapsodic Imagination
Heaven should not be something shared, or even rivaled, since the sover-
eign is truly singular in his glory. Those who would praise feudal lords
over the emperor are merely ignorant of the true state of affairs.
Wudi would have found such an argument appealing, as he was en-
gaged in consolidating centralized authority over the territories controlled
by dynastic kinsmen, and it is not surprising that he would have also been
fascinated with fu and fu writers. The grand rhapsodic tradition employed a virtuosic battery of rhetorical devices such as descriptive catalogues, parallelism, and lexical obscurity, which made it possible for the poet to ade-
quately represent the claims of absolute sovereignty within language.
These tropes and devices would make it possible to represent the sover-
eign’s claim of omnipotence within a form appropriate to the elegant
standards of court culture. It would seem that Sima Xiangru had a keen
understanding of the needs of imperial ideology in general, and of Wudi’s
desires in particular, for he followed the success of “Imperial Park” with
an even more extravagant work of praise for Wudi: “The Rhapsody on the
Great Man” 大人賦.
Sima Xiangru’s rhapsodies for Wudi
are concerned first and foremost
with the imaginary register of the imperium: they take the emperor simul-
taneously as the subject of the poem and as its primary audience, and draw
the emperor into an imaginary relationship with the poem’s simulacrum
of sovereignty. The poem’s fantasy of sovereign power is one that the em-
peror can inhabit through the act of reading (or listening), even as he is
seduced into a poetic misprision, identifying himself with the transcen-
dental subject of the poem. Once the emperor takes the rhapsody’s expan-
sive persona as his own person, he blurs the line between the representa-
tion and the thing represented. For Han Wudi, the promise of the poetic
fiction would be too alluring to deny, and he would become increasingly
convinced that he was the fiction of his role.
Sima Xiangru may have instituted a radical new conception of poetry,
one focused on the celebration of power, but he nevertheless retained the
tradition’s longstanding insistence on moral didacticism. At the end of
“Rhapsody on the Imperial Park,” the poet portrays the Son of Heaven,
having reached the extremes of pleasure, as realizing the folly of his ex-
travagance. This is an important moment because it turns the rhapsody
into something more than simply a work of epideixis, or praise. I quote the
relevant passage here:
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Palatial Form and the Rhapsodic Imagination
271
But then, in the midst of drinking, at the height of the music’s joy, the Son of
Heaven grew sad and disheartened, as if stricken with loss. He said, “Alas —this
is too extravagant! In Our leisure from the business of the court, with naught to
do, We would have wasted the days. So, following the Way of Heaven, We have
punished through killing, and in accordance with the season, found respite in this
place. But We fear that later generations would abandon themselves to dissipated
excess, and that once they have followed this course, they would not turn back.
This is not how one should amass a patrimony to pass down to one’s descen-
dants.” Thereupon, He brought the drinking and the hunt to an end, and gave
