The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China (review)

The Problem of Beauty is an eloquent and insightful analysis of what the author calls the “aesthetic turn” in Northern Song literati culture, the newly awakening consciousness among literati scholars that beauty and aesthetic pleasure were serious and worthy subjects to pursue and to write about. The author persuasively argues that the zealous pursuit of beauty, and more importantly, the thinking and writing accompanying it, revealed a commonality of attitude and mentality emblematic of new directions that leading scholars and writers of the eleventh century were seeking. This pursuit of beauty therefore may best be understood as a collective, self-conscious effort on the part of these scholars and writers to define their own identity. In his own efforts to define the “newness” of this culture, Egan proves as generous and reliable a guide as we have seen in his previous studies on leading individual writers of the period, most notably, Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 and Su Shi 蘇軾, two figures who played a key role in shaping that new culture and who figure prominently in the current book. The author leads us through one after another exciting, and in many cases, intriguing, features of the landscape of the new culture, with a calm confidence that is both reassuring and stimulating. The book is full of insights on both the general modality of the new culture and the reading of particular texts produced by it.

The book does not intend to provide “a comprehensive history of the artistic pursuits or the aesthetic thought of the period” (p. 1). It rather aims to articulate the overarching themes or “logic” (p. 4) of those pursuits and thought by closely examining their diverse and multiple manifestations in the actual unfolding of the new culture. The book consists of a series of essays whose topics range from the collecting and connoisseurship of calligraphy and painting to botanical treatises on the cultivation of flowering plants, the rise to prominence of a new form of poetry criticism (the shihua 詩話), and the transformation of the song lyric (ci 詞) into a viable and respectable form of literati self-expression. What drove all these activities and brought them together as a coherent intellectual pursuit, Egan argues, was the intense eleventh-century desire to break new ground, to transcend traditional barriers, to reach a new synthesis, a desire that was demonstrated in many other areas of literary and intellectual activity of the time. In the author’s persistent effort to describe and delineate the spirit and basic parameters of the new culture, he remains self-consciously resistant to the allure of treating the phenomenon as a fixed and one-dimensional development. He depicts it as a fluid and ongoing process, a development with all its historical and conceptual complexity. Furthermore, by defining the pursuit of beauty as a “problem,” the author remains fully aware of the gathering force of the counterargument, the Neo-Confucian tendency to downplay the value of such pursuits and to consider them as a hindrance to knowledge and morality.

After a brief introduction, each of the six chapters that comprise the main body of the book discusses one important aspect of that grand eleventh-century pursuit of beauty. Chapter 1, “Rethinking ‘Traces’ from the Past: Ouyang Xiu on Stone Inscriptions,” examines Ouyang Xiu’s path-breaking collection of stone inscriptions of ancient calligraphy, Jigu lu 集古錄 [Collected Records of the Past], and especially, his innovative interpretations of the past as demonstrated in his extensive colophons on the inscriptions. The author sets Ouyang’s intense emotional and personal reaction to the inscriptions historically in the context defined by the rigid and exclusive representation of the calligraphic past codified in Chunhua fatie 淳化法帖 [Calligraphy Models from Chunhua Pavilion], an imperial anthology produced in the 990s and sponsored by the second ruler of the Northern Song, Emperor Taizong. He convincingly argues that what really...