Qian Qianyi's Reflections on Yellow Mountain: Traces of a Late-Ming Hatchet and Chisel

Introduction

Introduction 1 Introduction If an artist desires to paint an object’s appearance, he should select its appearance. If he desires to paint an object’s substance he should select its substance. But he should not mistake appearance for substance 物之華取其華物之實取其實不可執華 為實. Jing Hao 荊浩 (fl. 907–23) attrib., “Bifa ji” 筆法記 [Account of Brush Methods]1 Some decades ago in his classic study, the eminent Viennese art historian E. H. Gombrich (1909–2001) marvelled “how long and arduous is the way between perception and representation” in sixteenth-century painted landscapes. To the landscape painter, he continued, “nothing can become a motif except what he can assimilate into the vocabulary he has already learned.”2 It was an articulation of a concept that had been at the core of the visual arts for centuries; Jing Hao’s concern to select 取 either appearance or substance reveals already an important distinction between meaning and form. Centuries later, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) could assert that painting was a cosa mentale — a thing of the mind — dismissing those painters who draw by the judgement of the eye and without the use of reason as no better than mirrors,3 while more recently, René Magritte (1898–1967) explained his La condition humaine (1933) with the comment that the world “is only a mental representation of [that which] we experience inside ourselves.”4 This book focuses primarily on landscape presented in written rather than visual form, specifically the ways in which a particular mountain was 2 Qian Qianyi’s Reflections on Yellow Mountain depicted in the youji 遊記 (travel accounts) produced during roughly the final century of Ming rule (1550–1644). This might seem far removed from the concerns of Gombrich, but the study has emerged out of a sense that we have been far too slow in literary criticism to recognize the vital role of the viewer in the process of representing the natural world. There remains in secondary scholarship a tendency to read the landscape descriptions found in youji as accurate historical and physical records of given sites, while ignoring the specific cultural contexts in which these descriptions were formed. James Hargett’s 20-year-old definition of the genre remains typical of the way in which travel essays are understood: To begin with, they contain a first-hand account of a brief excursion or an extended journey. The language used therein to describe the details of the trip is predominantly narrative. Second, they provide facts about the physical environment such as climate, relief, vegetation and land-use in a given region . . . The descriptions in these types of reports are “objective” or “impersonal” in that the author himself plays no direct role, but simply observes and reports on what he sees [my emphasis]. Third, youji works invariably reveal the author’s attitudes or opinions . . . This “subjective” or “personal” quality is the one characteristic that most clearly distinguishes the travel record from the geographical tracts found in most local histories (fangzhi).5 Drawing from the same framework, a more recent treatment of one lateMing traveller discusses his work in terms of an “ability to transcend different categories, drawing on both subjective and objective strands of travel writing.”6 It is not my intention here to pick holes in Professor Hargett’s outstanding study of the travel literature of the Song (960–1279), but it does seem to me that the notion of “facts about the physical environment,” in which “the author himself plays no direct role” implies of the observer a disinterest that can no longer be accepted so uncritically. All “objective” non-fictional writings are created not only by the descriptive tools at an author’s disposal, but by entire systems of cultural, political, social and aesthetic schemata that, at various levels of the observer’s consciousness, impose themselves on the world. By making a case here for a more nuanced and subtle treatment of youji in secondary literature, I hope to go some way towards removing the genre from its elemental you 遊 and ji 記, which, in Chinese as well as its usual English equivalent of “record” is freighted with connotations of verisimilitude not carried by other literary forms. Abandoning the oversimplified subjectiveobjective framework, my analysis begins with the assumption that all representations of landscape are culturally creative acts. Introduction 3 The specific case study around which this book revolves is the “Account of My Travels at Yellow Mountain” (You Huangshan ji 游黃山記), a ten-part essay...