The Double Life of the Scallop: Anthropomorphic Biography, 'Pulu,' and the Northern Song Discourse on Things

In the latter half of the eleventh century, Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101, jinshi 1057) wrote a biography of a provincial literatus named Jiang Yaozhu 江瑤柱, who was admired by local people but was unable to make a name for himself outside of his hometown. Su describes him as being handsome, talented, and creating precious pearls. As one reads on, it becomes clear that Jiang Yaozhu is not a human being, but rather a scallop.¹ The biography also turns out to be a treatise on the scallop's biology and cultural history. Su Shi's description of this handsome scallop-literatus belongs to a controversial genre that I will call "anthropomorphic biography," consisting of accounts of the lives of objects rather than real historical figures.² An anthropomorphic biography is a double text: a biography of a person's life and deeds, and a treatise containing specific knowledge of an object. In other words, the characters and their stories in the anthropomorphic biography are fictional constructs, and writers made innovative use of material knowledge in their fabrication of human lives.

This underlying material foundation of anthropomorphic biography shows a pronounced connection with a genre of writings called pulu 譜錄 ("manual," "catalogue," "treatise"), which proliferated during the latter half of the eleventh century. A pulu manual is a sort of object-specific encyclopedia dedicated to collecting, classifying and disseminating material knowledge about various things. Like the anthropomorphic biography, the manual exhibits an unprecedented enthusiasm in making sense of the material world, from describing the minute specificities of biological organisms to tracing the cultural history of objects. Both pulu and anthropomorphic biographies were produced and consumed with unprecedented enthusiasm in the eleventh century; the participants of this material discourse were not limited to the literati community (although literati comprised the majority), they ranged from the emperor to commoners.

The Song was a "thingly" world. Su Shi's scallop-literatus can only make sense as part of an intellectual shift towards the validation of the material world. The mid-eleventh century was an intriguing historical moment when important developments in many different aspects of Song literary culture intersected in the "discourse on things." In addition to the pulu manual and the anthropomorphic biography, this discourse manifested in different literary genres and social practices. The late Yoshikawa Kōjirō observed in Song poetry a new concern with mundane events of the everyday.³ When discussing the changing representation of flowers in classical poetry, Kawai Kōzō shared Yoshikawa's insight, noting a shift from understanding flowers as a general concept in the Tang, to referencing names of specific species in the Song.⁴ But the interest of Northern Song literati in the material world had reverberations far beyond poetic specificity. Ronald Egan has persuasively argued that the rise of botanical treatises in Ouyang Xiu's 歐陽脩 (1007–1072, jinshi 1030) generation contributed to a new aesthetic model, in which the appreciation of sensuous beauty coexisted with the traditional moral discourse that suppressed it.⁵ Furthermore, as Stephen Owen demonstrated with Ouyang Xiu's self-identification as the Layman of the "Six Ones" (liuyi 六一, the five sets of objects he owned plus himself), ownership of certain scholarly implements became indispensable part of a scholar's social identity in Northern Song literary discourse.⁶

Following these scholars' recent findings, this article examines the emergence of the "discourse on things" in the eleventh century. It first delineates the "culture of famous things" that emerged during the Song empire's unification and commercialization. The imperial court's appetite for local tributary products motivated scholar-officials serving in the regional bureaucracy to document practical knowledge about local goods, resulting in the rise of the new pulu genre. The circulation of pulu manuals made local material knowledge available to readers in other parts of the empire, which in turn inspired more writers to document products in their own localities. The material knowledge that was disseminated through the pulu provided a rich repertoire of sources for the creative fabrication of object-human double identities in the anthropomorphic...