Tao Qian: Sima Qian:: Impressionist: Circumstancist

Larson, Wendy. Literary Authority and the Modern Chinese Writer : Ambivalence and Autobiography. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

A temporo-spatio diagram translating the original literary code to one supplemented with differentiations of frequency and intensity of light. AKA a comic book.

Although my first inspection of Larson's work left me with a very positive impression, my heart sank through the course of chapter 1. I appreciate the basic distinction between two "prototypes" of autobiography: Sima Qian's "circumstantial" type and Tao Qian's "impressionistic" type. Texts by Liu Yuxi and Bo Juyi does buttress this argument. And there are many interesting points found in the notes -- even a fascinating argument-in-miniature that remembers Western autobiographical theory's thought of the constructed self as a set of overlapping perspectives, with application to Sima Qian. So what's my problem then?

The chapter tastes too dry. Why does a "semiotic approach" have to completely forgo any mention of literary style? Aren't the 'referents' we are dealing with major elements of style? Avoiding style is just one clue that makes me feel like Larson isn't identifying with her subjects very much. No, I'm not saying one must identify with the subjects of study - I'm just saying that if you don't, things start to sound a bit clinical. On Tao Qian's recluse aesthetic, for example -- it becomes not an aesthetic, but a "code" :

Thus the 'literary code' is not just writing or literary writing, but includes reference to various components of the life-style of a nonsocially engaged literatus.

"Nonsocially engaged literatus"? No wonder Larson doesn't want to talk literary style. This sounds clinical to the point of not encouraging anyone to be interested in the aesthetic -- at least that's my read. To be fair, Larson has a much better handle on Sima Qian, the defensive scholar: he must make his work be his excuse for living with a defiled body. She gets this and provides a concise statement of his self-definition. This is crucial work; still, I want to make fun of it:

The self or identity of the writer is defined temporally through its lineage and spatially through the physical sites of its existence. Both the temporal and spatial aspects of this definition of the self take material phenomena as the framework of their reference.

Translation: His memories of places, people and events important to him are the elements of his sense of himself. I question the need to dwell on the topic with such dry, clinical terms! That said, I'm writing my first two lectures to reflect and incorporate the divisions put forth here. I'll just try to make them a little more enlivening.

Coda: Self

What is the 'self'? From Sima Qian and Liu Yuxi we get the sense that their 'selves' are those portions of them that possess the motive to vindicate the self. It is what has the motive to vindicate itself, and it is the thing that is vindicated. "In this capacity within the Chinese tradition it [the work of Liu Yuxi, and Sima Qian's text as well] is a true auto-biography, or a biography written by the self, that attempts to define the self in a context identical to that of orthodox biography."

So is every text a new self? A fresh start? This is an important question in the case of Tao Qian, because his is an "impressionistic biography" which "creates a totally unique textual identity."

Impressionistic autobiographies challenge the significance of history, ancestry, and memory in constructing a textual self. Memory is the mind of the present remembering, and through this process altering, the past and bringing out the parts of it which inform the present self.

I'm thinking here of the self that is similarly lodged, similarly impressionistically, in the farming poetry of Tao Qian. Is that unique? A product of its own present? I guess so. But doesn't it bear some relationship to the self of Five Willows? Or was Five Willows a one-shot deal that Tao Qian would be annoyed to find has become the overriding statement of his 'self'? There are many more pieces, such as the self-eulogy, or his eulogies for others, that are a touch less 'impressionistic' and a touch more 'circumstantial.' How to connect all of these together?