Everybody show us your Tao Yuanmings

Swartz, Wendy. Reading Tao Yuanming : shifting paradigms of historical reception (427-1900). Cambridge Mass.: published by the Harvard University Asia Center ;distributed by Harvard University Press, 2008.

"Introduction"

When Swartz presents her motivation for this study, I saw her anticipating many of the questions I had begun to ask myself as I was preparing to teach about Tao Yuanming. I think because I was seeing my own half-formed thoughts fully articulated in this introduction, all I could do was marvel at a few of the juicier passages:

I have to believe that this old gentleman never really died. Even
today he remains awe-inspiring and alive.
— Xin Qiji 辛棄疾 (1140–1207)

Xin Qiji, the Patriot Lyricist (Bio on EpochTimes.com)

What a wonderful epigraph! Such an amazing indication of the rich influence Tao Yuanming has enjoyed over later generations of Chinese intellectuals -- one wonders what range of responses exists: did everybody love Tao as Xin Qiji did? (Oh, and what's up with this guy? Why does the Epochtimes host a creepy agitprop portrait of him? Methink me smells another Wen Tianxiang.) Did Tao have detractors? Did women appreciate the figure (persona, face) of Tao Yuanming as well? This is plainly Swartz's task. She promises a systematic use of reception theory, going back to the writings of Gauss.

Reception ought to be a topic of special centrality in Chinese literary history, in light of the time it spans, the relative stability and continuity of the literary language, and the accessibility of the literary corpus...a study of literary reception in the Chinese tradition must examine literary questions in relation to nonliterary categories, such as history, biography, and morality.

Swartz wisely focuses this broad scope of inquiry almost immediately, promising to examine a "dialogue spanning fifteen hundred years about three categories that lay at the heart of literati culture: reclusion, personality, and poetry." I wonder about the scope one should choose for such a study. Swartz by all account wishes to focus on other Chinese, male, intellectuals. Of course she means to examine famous Tao Yuanming admirers like Su Shi, Liang Qichao, or Lu Xun. But what about women readers? What about the possibility of a popular reception, including representations in modern fiction? I'm not criticizing Swartz at all here, just thinking aloud about different lines of investigation to which we can also apply reception theory. Swartz might be said to have laid the groundwork for future study by beginning with the most general case reasonably handled in a book-length project: "central issues animating premodern Chinese culture as a whole." I'll suspend judgment on this choice of scope for now.

From here, Swartz moves to a beginning: the influence of Tao Yuanming's biography, generally, as it is likely to have been imagined by previous readers:

Tao Yuanming, above all, wrote about himself. There is no extant precedent in Chinese literature for the candor with which Tao Yuanming spoke about his principles, fears, personal fancies, and wants, or for the scrupulous dating and prefatory notes he attached to his works. The strong autobiographical presence in Tao’s writings raises two immediate questions: how much agency has he been granted in determining his own critical reception, and to what extent did his detailed self-characterizations define and constrain later interpretations of him and his works?

To begin answering this question, Swartz presents a conclusion that I had just hit upon myself in the previous few days, though I had not said it so clearly:

The core of Tao’s autobiographical project lies somewhere between earnestness and playfulness, the latter implying a recognition of both the boundaries of autobiographical writing and the intention to push them.

This is a really nice statement of the central issue here. What's at stake is nothing less than the definitions of history and literature, and the frought question of distinguishing them. The nature of truth also comes up here -- we have historical truths, psychological truths, and maybe others as well -- poetic, artistic truths? The question of Tao Qian's significance in the development of Chinese political thought, in the basic ideology of Chinese intellectuals as informed through great works of literature, begins to emerge.

Reception as Mechanism; as Process

Swartz goes on to describe in general terms a literary-historical framework that matches so exactly with my interests that I am sure to memorize these words and use them over and over again:

We have Tao’s texts as redacted and restored by later readers. What we do know are readers’ interpretations of Tao and his works; what we can infer are the motivations behind these readings; what we can learn are the changes in literati values and reading practices; and what we can understand are the mechanisms behind Tao’s reception and construction.

Canonization is merely the first step of this process (this "mechanism"?)

My discussion distinguishes between canonization and reception, a process that continues after a writer has achieved iconic stature and his works normative status as an embodiment of a culture’s values.

Once an established icon, the shifting patterns of reception map against shifting cultural values:

His withdrawal brought to the foreground issues central to traditional literati culture: service versus reclusion, public duty versus self-cultivation, and loyalty to the state versus a transcendence of politics.

(Theoretical note: I've connected "values" here with "issues," a logical breakthrough for me. As issues are contested in a society, values are tested. For every major issue there are models, solutions -- portraits -- offered up by the culture to illustrate values. The values that writers can stand behind come to last the longest. But these can shift radically over the course of a culture's life. Witness Chinese family values in the age of revolution.)