Dialectics of Spontaneity: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Su Shi (1037–1101) in Poetry by Yang Zhiyi (review)

Yang Zhiyi describes the project of Dialectics of Spontaneityas a "continuous exegetical effort that calls Su Shi to relive in the modern" (p. 22). Yang explores topics that others have discussed in the Chinese and English scholarship on Su Shi 蘇軾 with an eye to complicating the interpretations and reframing the significance of Su Shi's writings in contemporary, largely Western critical terms. These are ambitious goals based on a distinctive critical stance that from the outset both produces insights worthy of reflection and raises larger conceptual and methodological problems for the community of scholars.

In the Introduction, Yang discusses "spontaneity" as an essentially hybrid term that echoes Song dynasty concerns but is built out of a set of Western critical concepts mediated through the long history of the intellectual culture of late imperial China: "I argue that artistic spontaneity can only be defined negatively—as the absolute opposite of convention or intentionality. 'Spontaneous creation' is a dynamic process in which the artist's subjectivity persistently—and vainly—rejects itself" (p. 1). When Yang elaborates—"'artistic spontaneity' is further perceived as a state of unreflective immediacy that one 'returns' to after having mastered a modular set of skills, actions or ways of thought through a long period of concentrated and mindful practice" (p. 3)—one surely can recognize Su Shi's rejection of intentionality in his youthful "Preface to Traveling in the South" and in his well-known "Assessment of My Writings" 自評文. Yet her inclusion of the rejection of conventional forms sounds more like Li Zhi's 李贄 (1527–1602) anxious search for authenticity than like Su Shi's confident assimilation of received traditions. From the beginning, Yang shapes her critical terms to focus not on Su Shi's concerns but those of later culture and of the present day.

The understanding of "art" and "literature" that Yang articulates in the Introduction is unapologetically Western. She notes: "'Art' derives from the Latin word ars, meaning 'skill, craft'" (p. 3). Her methodology here is risky, because of the need to be very careful about the additional assumptions one brings in when drawing on Western traditions. For example, although one can see a form of spontaneity as a consistent goal in major Song writers like Su Shi, Yang Wanli 楊萬里, and Lu You 陸游, Yang also draws on European Romanticism to define "spontaneity": "Generally, eighteenth-century Romanticism emphasized the need for spontaneity in thought and action, and in the expression of thought, which resulted from natural genius and the power of imagination" (p. 5). "Genius" and "imagination," which evolved in a complex post-Kantian cultural movement, frame issues of freedom and truth in ways deeply foreign to the Northern Song elite. More particularly, in Romanticism, the locus of creation was in an individual genius that could look beyond the meaningless world of cause-and-effect that is the manifold of experience to glimpse a separate world of freedom. Thus Yang notes that "Schiller regards all aesthetic experience as potentially liberating because it is disengaged from the material" (p. 7). This version of spontaneity as linked to genius, human freedom, and a world beyond remains at the very heart of Yang's reading of Su Shi. As I shall discuss below, this view of creativity as an act of the imagination as it sloughs off the claims of the material introduces a consistent assumption that meaning is in the self rather than in the myriad patterns of the phenomenal realm 萬物之理. This view, even as it calls Su Shi into the modern, leaves the Northern Song far behind.

Beginning in the Introduction in a variety of small ways, Yang develops an understanding of literary meaning that consistently breaks off the engagement of the artist with the world. These interconnected commitments accumulate to shape Yang's interpretive framework. For example, she writes, "If, as Wendy Swartz argues, ziranin the Six Dynasties primarily...