Words Well Put: Visions of Poetic Competence in the Chinese Tradition (review)

At three words, or two or one (depending on your definition of "definition"), the canonical Chinese gloss on poetry-shi yan zhi 詩言志-is perhaps the briefest and cleanest on record. That the key word is a pun adds to its sharpness. However, this is just one way to define poetry.¹ There are many other ways, more or less valid, more or less precise, to say what poetry is, whence it comes, and what it does. There may even be, as Wallace Stevens said, a poem within every poem. But whatever else it is or may be, poetry is a shared activity. The Muse sings, but not to herself. Like a tree falling in a Berkeleian forest, a poem to be made real must be read, recited, heard-or overheard (ad J. S. Mill)-by someone, sometime.

Acknowledgement of poetry's affective quality, both moral and emotional, is deeply rooted in China's traditional culture. This requires understanding, assimilation, and manipulation of the classical language. Mastery would be demonstrated in various ways. But throughout at least the manuscript or pre-print era, up to the tenth or eleventh century (and arguably beyond, though certain emphases changed in the early modern period), such control was incomplete unless one had the ability personally to refashion or add to the tradition in one's own words, especially in verse. Knowledge should rightly be supplemented by competence.

In the book at hand Graham Sanders studies "poetic competence," which he describes as "the ability of a person to deploy poetic discourse as a means of affecting the attitude and behavior of another person in order to achieve a desired end" (p. 6). This, he argues, "can only be immediately apprehended in the context of a narrative, where the conditions of a poem's production and the effects of its reception can be ascertained" (p. 6). Basically, he will be dealing with a selection of poems from judiciously chosen ancient and medieval texts that enwrap those poems in an anecdotal web. The purpose of such a study, says Sanders, "is not to systematically establish the social conditions of poetic production and reception, but to delineate the evolving concept of what a poem is and the changing idea of what one might plausibly achieve through poetic performance" (p. 6). This statement contains several unexamined assumptions, chief among them being that there is indeed a chronological development to be discovered in the concept and play of poetry itself. Another assumption is that the controlling imperatives of the genres (official chronicle, pseudo history, apologue, didactive tale, fictive entertainment, assorted curiosa) in which the chosen poetic texts are presented can safely be left out of the equation while we focus on a reified object of study. One may need to probe these matters a bit further. Although Sanders makes a brave attempt in the opening pages of the book to construct a theoretical framework, complete with what he calls nested contexts and trans-contextual forces, as well as locutionary acts, illocutionary force, and perlocutionary effects, the theory he designs (graphically represented in figure 1 of the Appendix) is invoked only sporadically in the chapters that follow. It does not seem all that helpful or convincing. The farther we read, the more gestural it becomes; and the author himself gradually seems to outgrow it. This is not unfortunate, for the book is far more engaging for its literary criticism than for its literary or social theory.

The temporal scope of Sanders's project allows him to roam through a millennium or more of Chinese texts. The five chapters of the book hone in on four particular moments (or "visions," to adopt the term used in the subtitle) that Sanders sees as especially suggestive. He thus treats readers to discrete inquiries into certain poems and their circumstances as related in Zuo zhuan 左傳, Han shu 漢書, Shishuo xinyu 世說新語, and Benshi shi 本事詩. He devotes a substantial chapter to each of these...