The Shaman and the Heresiarch: A New Interpretation of the Li sao by Gopal Sukhu (review)

GOPAL SUKHU, The Shaman and the Heresiarch: A New Interpretation of the Li sao. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012. xii, 265 pp. US$80.00 (hbk). ISBN 978-14384 -4283-9 Gopal Sukhu’s highly original, if unevenly executed, new study of the ‘‘Li sao’’ 離 騷 is the most detailed treatment of the poem in English since Lim Boon Keng’s 1929 The Li sao, an Elegy on Encountering Sorrows.18 Apart from David Hawkes’s fine translation of the entire Chuci 楚辭 anthology,19 Western sinology has paid the poem nothing like the attention deserved by such a seminal work of Chinese literature. The most valuable aspect of Sukhu’s work is how he integrates the research of mainland Chinese scholars from the past three decades, particularly on excavated texts from Guodian 郭店 and other aspects of Warring States culture, with the long tradition of Chuci philology. This new body of material is so rich that one wishes Sukhu could have expanded the scale of this rather slight tome. Apart from placing it in its proper historical context, Sukhu also argues that the ‘‘Li sao’’ has little or nothing to do with the historical Qu Yuan 屈原 (ca. 343–278 BCE), but is instead the drama of a divinity-possessed shaman named Zhengze Ling Jun 正則靈均, the sobriquets of the speaker given at the beginning of the poem. He further argues that the poem contains a long-overlooked critique of new trends in political thought, particularly Ruism/Confucianism/ritualism (Sukhu’s use of the terms is inconsistent). This reviewer deeply appreciates Sukhu’s attempt to take the ‘‘Li sao’’ seriously in the context of Warring States religion and philosophy. Yet the interpretation he sets forth is not quite as original as he claims. Though Sukhu surveys the Chinese scholarship questioning Qu Yuan’s authorship of Chuci poems, dating back to the first half of the twentieth century, he neglects to cite the more recent Japanese scholarship that is also skeptical of Qu Yuan’s authorship, such as the work of Hoshikawa Kiyotaka 星川孝清, Okamura Shigeru 岡村繁, and Ishikawa Misao 石川三佐男. Sukhu blames the flaws in traditional Chinese readings on a politically motivated mystification perpetrated by Wang Yi 王逸 (fl. 114–120 CE), an early redactor of the poems. But traditional interpretations, whatever their flaws, already present the poem as a mélange encompassing both shamanistic rituals and political argumentation. It is Sukhu who is choosing to oversimplify. More generally, Sukhu’s interdisciplinary approach lacks the discipline of serious literary study, and fails to do justice to the rhetorical richness of the poem. Sukhu is particularly determined to reinterpret the fourth line of the ‘‘Li sao,’’ which he sees as crucial to his argument, and renders 惟庚寅吾以降 as ‘‘On the first day of the first lunation, I came down from above’’ (p. 183).20 Sukhu criticizes 18 The Li Sao: An Elegy on Encountering Sorrows by Ch’ü Yüan (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1929). 19 David Hawkes, tr. Ch’u Tz’u: The Songs of the South (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), rpt. as The Songs of the South: An Anthology of Ancient Chinese Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985). 20 Why Sukhu renders 庚寅 gengyin as ‘‘the first day of the first lunation’’ is a mystery not clarified by his reference to Hawkes, who properly identifies it as the twenty-seventh day of the sexagenary cycle. 86 BOOK REVIEWS Wang Yi’s explanation of the line as referring to Qu Yuan’s birth, and returns to this problem over and over throughout the book, based on his conviction that jiang 降 can never mean ‘‘to be born’’ in classical Chinese, and should be taken literally as ‘‘to descend,’’ that is, for a divine being to descend from Heaven. But in Sukhu’s own discussion of the issue, he cites a phrase in the Shijing 詩經 in which jiang is used to refer to a minister who aided the Shang ruler (p. 36) and not to an actual divinity descending from Heaven.21 Sukhu’s understanding of the denotation of jiang is correct, but by ignoring the rhetorical context he misses a more interesting and coherent reading, that the human speaker is intentionally asserting his own semi-divine...