Revisiting the scene of the party: a study of the Lanting collection.

AuthorSwartz, Wendy
PositionCritical essay

The Lanting (sometimes rendered as "Orchid Pavilion") gathering in 353 is one of the most famous literati parties in Chinese history. (1) This gathering inspired the celebrated preface written by the great calligrapher Wang Xizhi [??] (303-361), another preface by the poet Sun Chuo [??] (314-371), and forty-one poems composed by some of the most intellectually active men of the day. (2) The poems are not often studied since they have long been overshadowed by Wang's preface as a work of calligraphic art and have been treated as examples of xuanyan ("discourse on the mysterious [Dao]") poetry, (3) whose fate in literary history suffered after influential Six Dynasties writers decried its damage to the classical tradition. (4) Historian Tan Daoluan [??] (fl. 459) traced the trend to its full-blown development in Sun Chuo and Xu Xun [??] (fl. ca. 358), who were said to have continued the work of inserting Daoist terms into poetry that was started by Guo Pu [??] (276-324); they moreover "added the [Buddhist] language of the three worlds [past, present, and future], and the normative style of the Shi [??] and Sao [??] came to an end." (5) Critic Zhong Rong [??] (ca. 469-518) then faulted their works for lacking appeal. His critique was nothing short of scathing: he argued that they represented a continuation of the insipid ([??] "bland in its lack of taste") works of the Yongjia period (307-313) in which "philosophical principles surpassed diction" [??] and "were all flat and pedantic, like Discourses on the Way and Virtue. The vigorous style of the Jian' an period thus came to an end". [??] (6)

Over the past two decades, scholars (mostly in China) have begun to revisit xuanyan poetry, resulting in a growing body of scholarship that purports to reassess these poems. However, many of these studies cling to some of the same old prejudices against these poems and thus yield limited scholarly value. One prevalent pattern has been to recognize the importance of these poems in literary history but then to conclude that their flaw remains a lack of lyrical quality. (7) Another approach has been to treat these poems as essentially abstract works that ultimately transcend the material world to grasp at the mysterious principles alluded to in Lao-Zhuang thought and manifested in the workings of nature. (8) In the following article, I wish to complicate our view of xuanyan poetry by examining a special subset of it, the Lanting poems. Not only are they among the best and most developed examples of this type of poetry, they also represent early experimental landscape verse. This article will address how the Lanting poems utilize poetic devices and techniques such as imagery, metaphor, and heightened language. These poems will be shown to reveal individual stances on shared intellectual interests as well as to sketch out the terms of early landscape poetry, forging together a common language and set of tropes. In addition, as the best-known example of group poetry, this set of poems, along with its two prefaces, provides fertile ground for exploring the social dynamics of the banquet party. Group composition meant to commemorate the event inspires both a sense of camaraderie, in which fathers and sons, patrons and friends share in particular concerns or appreciation of the experience at Lanting, as well as a spirit of competition, in which performers vie to exhibit more understanding or wit than the others. My discussion of the performance of intellectual attitudes and the representation of the natural setting in the Lanting collection begins with the event itself.

WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN

Wang Xizhi, who was serving as Governor of Guiji, hosted the spring excursion at Lanting and provided the most detailed account of the events that took place during the Lustration Festival or the Double-Three Festival in 353. Beyond the ostensible purpose of the outing, which was to perform purification rites by the water, Wang Xizhi's preface describes the activities of floating wine cups down a winding stream, composing verses, and contemplating nature and the cosmos. Eleven of the forty-one participants left us with at least two poems each, one in pentasyllabic and another in tetrasyllabic form. (9) Writing a pentasyllabic poem and a tetrasyllabic one to the same topic was common practice for Jin social situations such as group banquets and poetic exchanges. (10) Another fifteen participants each wrote only one poem. (11) As for the fifteen attendees who could not produce a poem, they were each subjected to the not so cruel and unusual punishment of drinking three dou [??] (approximately 6.5 quarts) of wine. (12) There is precedent for this punishment of three dou of wine: at the Jingu yuan [??] (Golden Valley Garden) gathering in 296, those among Shi Chong's [??] (249-300) guests who could not compose a poem had apparently been penalized with three dou of wine.

The forty-one Lanting poems, though varying dramatically in skill and interest, bear a collective imprint: common themes, references, and vocabulary thread together these poems. Some poems share apt allusions to the famous passage in the Analects. describing Zeng Xi's (and Confucius') wish to visit the Rain Altar in a late spring outing to the Yi River or to the well-known passage in the Zhuangzi asserting the joy of fish swimming in the Hao River. (13) Other Zhuangzian ideas and images also figure prominently in the collection. For example, the act of marveling at the "ten thousand pipings" (wan lai [??]), or the myriad phenomena, in one poem finds resonance in the philosophical perspective of "seeing things as leveled" (qi wu [??]) in another. The Zhuangzi, along with the Yijing, or Classic of Changes, and Daodejing, or Classic of the Way and Virtue, formed the foundation of early medieval discourse: the literati freely drew ideas, vocabulary, and tropes from these so-called Three Mysterious (san xuan [??]) texts to reinterpret the classics and express their positions on major issues ranging from politics to human behavior to nature. The many meditations found in the Lanting poems on the workings of the mysterious Dao, which is manifested by manifold phenomena in nature and the various existences or beings (you [??]) that are perceptible, reflect as much the power of the physical environment of the gathering as the predominance of a major concern of the "learning of the mysterious," or xuanxue [??]. Indeed, one of the recurrent philosophical points in these poems is the relationship of the many, varied, and myriad to the one, unity, and single truth: the blending of the myriad into one single unity, that is to say, the Dao.

Above all, most of the poems express sheer exuberance over the opportunity to express freely; the terms chang [??] (without restraint) and san [??] (to disperse) are favorites among the Lanting poets. In these free expressions, the poets consistently celebrate ziran [??] (in both the sense of nature's workings and freedom from office). While the Lanting poets composed verses in a group setting, and thus drew from a common pool of ideas and sentiments, many appeared to have engaged directly with nature in a personal, contemplative manner. To say that distinct identities emerged from this group setting would be to understate the differences in view and attitude among them.

THE TWO PREFACES

Although Wang Xizhi's preface to the Lanting poems has been primarily treated as calligraphic art, its summary account of the Lanting outing has also been valued as the main source of information about the collective experience. Both it and Sun Chuo's lesser-known preface represent a contemplative engagement with nature, but their narratives diverge dramatically in terms of response and mode of representation. We begin with Wang's preface, which gives one of the most picturesque descriptions of the landscape in the entire collection: "The place was one of mighty mountains and towering ridges covered by lush forests and tall bamboo, where a clear stream with swirling eddies cast back a sparkling light upon both shores" [??]. (14) This vivid image of a shiny sash of water flowing between two shores, surrounded by towering mountains, helps explain the heightened sense of wonder expressed in a subsequent passage in the preface: "Above us we looked on the immensity of the universe; then lowering our eyes, we then saw nature's infinite variety. And as we let our eyes roam and our hearts speed from thought to thought we could experience the greatest delights of ear and eye--this was true happiness" [??]. As the day went on, the joy felt in this occasion pervades the company as a coherent experience, already part of the past: "Then, as we weary of the direction in which we are going, our mood shifts with life's events, and depression inevitably follows. In the blink of an eye the joy that has been becomes an experience past--yet still we cannot help having our feelings stirred by it."

In the final passage, the downbeat note struck by ponderings over such timeless concerns as the transience of things and the inevitability of death is answered by a hopeful belief in the continuity of like-minded men:

Those in later times will look on today as we today look on the past--there is the sadness! For this reason I have written out the list of those present at that time and copied their compositions. Though ages change and experiences differ, all share what stirs deep feelings. And those who read this in later times will also be moved by what is in the writing. [??] Ultimately, the claim advanced by Wang's preface is that reading and writing are what allow men to transcend fleetingness and link them to both past and future. Asserting a literary immortality when reckoning with death is a classical response, which developed from the idea of "three things that never decay" (son bu xiu [??]) from the Zuo zhuan [??] (Zuo commentary [to the Spring and Autumn Annals]), which are, in...

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