"Interlude"

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.

"Interlude: Tao Yuanming's Autobiographical Project" (pp. 130-144)

Don't forget to consider the medium of the self-portrait (thanks, de Man)

Swartz starts off strong with a promise to analyze the texts of Tao Yuanming's "core autobiographical project" in terms of "a documentary mode" and "a fictive mode," but in the end there doesn't seem to be any way of distinguishing the two -- witness Tao's "Biography of Master Five Willows," which demonstrates "play with historiographic conventions." What evidence is there, specifically, that this piece is in a "fictive mode?" And what makes us so certain the poetry prefaces are in a "documentary mode"? Was it that Tao dwelt on leisure? Was it that Tao on the one hand wrote fanciful portraits of the historical model of Qian Lou and other recluses, or that he created an innovative "new look for reclusion" in his prefaces? I don't see any really "documentary" mode here. Could it be in Tao Yuanming's poetry, which takes on an unprecedented range of themes like family, neighbors, joys andmisfortunes? That seems as fictive a mode as any! Swartz's application of terms like "mode" gestures at an application of modern Western autobiographical theory, from Lejeune to Paul de Man, but it is really
no more than a gesture. That is too bad.