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  • Ten Thousand Scrolls: Reading and Writing in the Poetics of Huang Tingjian and the Late Northern Song by Yugen Wang
  • Jennifer W. Jay (bio)
Yugen Wang. Ten Thousand Scrolls: Reading and Writing in the Poetics of Huang Tingjian and the Late Northern Song. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asian Center, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2011. xiii, 285 pp. Hardcover $39.95, isbn 978-0-674-06255-9.

Yugen Wang’s monograph, based on his Harvard University doctoral dissertation, is a powerful cross-disciplinary study of the poetics and literary criticism of the notable poet, calligrapher, and painter Huang Tingjian (1045–1105), whose literary production took place against the backdrop of the print revolution in late eleventh-century Song China. Born to an eminent scholar-official clan in south China’s Jiangxi Province, he was nurtured in the scholarly libraries owned by the families of his mother and father. He passed the jinshi examination at the young age of twenty-two but only ever held minor posts. This monograph is mainly concerned with the last two decades of his life, during which he was a prolific poet and literary critic, at the same time that he fell victim to purges and exile because, like the versatile eminent artist Su Shi (1037–1101), he identified with the conservatives who opposed the reform policies of the Wang Anshi (1021–1086) faction.

Yugen Wang situates his study of the poetics of Huang Tingjian in the broader context of print culture and consumerism in the late eleventh century; as such, it falls within the recent trend to integrate material culture with literature.1 Huang Tingjian’s discourse of poetics, on methods (fa 法), form, techniques, and approach to writing and reading poetry, was circulated to a network of poets and writers, colleagues, students, and nephews. The individuals who took his poetics [End Page 386] as a road map or guide for their own composition came to be identified with the Jiangxi school of poetry 江西詩派 that, after Huang Tingjian died in exile in Guangxi, came under criticism but remained active for several decades into the Southern Song.

In the first of five chapters that together delineate the poetics of Huang Tingjian, Yugen Wang comments on Huang gazing back at the Tang and canonizing its major poet, Du Fu (712–770), as the absolute, exemplary model of perfection to which contemporary writers should strive. Huang Tingjian’s adaptation of allusions and metaphors found in the classical literature has been criticized as a process of “snatching the embryo and changing the bones and transforming iron into gold 奪胎換骨; 點鐵成金” (p. 36). Yugen Wang argues that it involved an innovative process that took inspiration from the past and reworked the allusions so they reemerged in creative and unpredictable forms. Huang opined that rather than relying on the flow of talent, meticulous effort and technical skills were required to bring literary production to perfection. Effort alone would not be enough; the right methods had to be precise and applicable to the genre, otherwise the end product would not reflect the inherent, true colors. Huang worked at craftsmanship and researched rare works with intense concentration, convinced that the poetics for writing poetry could not serve as the precise guide for writing prose. So, when a colleague’s brother sought his assessment on a piece of prose, Huang directed him to someone more accomplished in prose than he. He equated the request with the metaphor of a woman skilled in embroidery switching to making brocade, a move that could bring different expectations and outcomes. Huang advocated striving for excellence in writing poetry, as did Du Fu, with the rigor, effort, patience, and perseverance of Confucius (550–479 b.c.e.), seeking to reach moral perfection by the age of seventy.

In chapter 2 we see Huang Tingjian using the motif of the handle and the hatchet as method (fa) to guide the path and destination of literary creativity. This process of seeking the right couplet could be seen as an interdependent process, as in the image that the handle could not be independent of the hatchet. Huang’s “step and path building” method appropriates carpentry language (handle, hatchet, chisel, marking lines) to arrive...

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