Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture: The Record of a Dusty Table

4. Food, Death, & Narration

132 4 Food, Death, & Narration D eath and narration seem to share a darkly close relationship. In Boccaccio’s Decameron, vivid stories are set in the threatening narrative frame of the Great Plague, which casts its shadow over the merry tales. In the Chinese tradition, establishing oneself by words (li yan) is on a level with establishing virtue (li de) and establishing deeds (li gong)—“the three things that do not decay” (san buxiu).1 Discourse, in the broadest sense of the word, is seen as a way of resisting mortality. In Tao Yuanming’s poetic discourse the poet constantly returns to the essential substances of human life, which for Tao Yuanming are often intertwined: food, drink, and words. Tao Yuanming was squarely situated in a continuous but also ever-changing literary tradition, and he was first of all a writer, not a philosopher or thinker. It is much more productive to ask how Tao Yuanming made use of poetic conventions than to engage in a debate about whether he was primarily a Confucian or a Daoist or a mixture of both. It is true that Tao Yuanming’s poetry and prose are filled with allusions to The Analects, and they are also rich with echoes of the Daoist classics, such as Zhuangzi, Laozi, and even the later Liezi.2 But the refer- food, death, & narration 133 ences appear as poetic images or as phrases coming in handy when the right occasion or mood calls; they do not necessarily form a systematic structure of philosophical thought. A poem is, after all, not a treatise. Tao Yuanming writes both in the literary tradition and in a contemporary cultural milieu, and it is his genius, which often is expressed as a kind of quirkiness, that gives a particular twist to his poetry, in which one can nonetheless always recognize thematic elements from earlier poetry and from current intellectual concerns. Divisions into “poetic schools” are often more for convenience in mapping literary history than for describing a particular moment in literary historical reality, which is never neat and clear-cut. The influences of predecessors and contemporaries may frequently be revealed in small and indirect ways, and come out in strange metamorphoses, especially in the works of an innovative poet. Tao Yuanming shares his contemporaries’ penchant for the supernatural, but his interest in the poetic past—the poetry of the Jian’an (196–220) and the Western Jin periods—is unique in his age (it would be Xie Lingyun’s task to bring the Jian’an poetic world to the public’s attention again, by his poem series “Imitations of The Collection of Ye” [Ni Ye zhong ji]). This leads to Tao Yuanming’s particular version of “the poetry of roaming immortals” (youxian shi), which is realized not in seeking immortals through the usual means—such as visiting famous mountains, taking a magic drug, or practicing breathing techniques—but rather in the experiences of reading, reflecting, and exercising literary imagination. Invariably, such experiences are associated with another essential element in Tao Yuanming’s poetry—food and drink. Obtaining Immortality “Drinking Alone during Incessant Rain” (or, “No Visitors during Incessant Rain and I Drink Alone” [Lianyu renjue duyin]) is a good place to begin. The title of the poem is an interesting one: the “incessant rain” is a peculiar occasion, whose significance would be obvious to Tao Yuanming’s contemporaries. “Suffering from the rain” (kuyu) was already an established topic by Tao Yuanming’s time; Ruan Yu (165?–212), Fu Xuan (217–278), and Lu Ji all wrote about it.3 Zhang Xie’s (?–307) poem on the topic was singled out by the famous sixth-century critic Zhong Rong (?–518?) as among the best five-character poems in the tradition.4 Zhong Rong’s praise was probably influenced by Jiang Yan, who, in his “Thirty Poems of Miscellaneous Forms” (Zati shi sanshi shou), picked this poem as representative of Zhang Xie’s style and did an imitation of it.5 Tao Yuanming 134 chapter four himselfhasapoem,“HangingClouds”(Tingyun),inwhichthepoetlamentsthat the rain has turned the level land to rivers and separated him from his friend(s): “Quietly I stay on the eastern porch, / cherishing spring wine by myself.” But the rain in “Hanging Clouds” is, after all, “seasonal rain” (shiyu; that is, spring rain), which helps the trees in the poet’s garden grow (“The trees in the eastern...