Contour plowing on east slope: a new reading of Su Shi.

• Author: Pease, Jonathan

Michael Fuller has studied how the poetic voice of Su Shi (1037-1101) evolved from youth through early middle age, attaining its well-known mature form during Su's exile at Huangzhou in his late forties. The detail and emphasis on literary theory of Fuller's book may help raise Su Shi studies in the West to a new sophistication. Some of the book's limitations are deliberate: it discusses only shi, not ci, and does not study the poet's later works. Other limitations are symptomatic of many new Western studies in Chinese literature: translations that are accurate but hard to follow, overly theoretical analysis that distorts some poems' contents, and occasional attribution of a harshness or violence to classical voices that is misleading and probably not authentic.

1. SEEKING VOICES

   For those of us who did not live in the Song, it is probably easier to understand Song paintings than Song poems. A sensitive person with no sinological background, thinking entirely in English, can still develop a feel for Song paintings-or porcelain or architecture-distinguish them from those of the Tang or Ming, and begin to feel subtleties of individual style. Specialists can do far more. But with Song poetry, Western scholars are only now edging toward a search for those elusive elements that combine to make poetic voices." And this exploration is still engulfed by the need to continue with sinology's original business: deciphering texts and reassembling events. An enormous amount of this basic work is necessary even to read classical comments about poems with any intelligence, to say nothing of reading the poems themselves or producing analyses of one's own. Half-visible behind a screen of language, their origins and uses by no means as clear as those ink-painted fishing streams or celadon brush-washers, Song-dynasty poems simply will not project their voices to an unprepared reader, even in Chinese, and not to any reader in translation.

   Along with further philological research, we also need to gain a better grasp of broad trends before presuming to guess how particular writers produced particular poems and how they were first read. We still have much to learn about the entire Song before we can truly probe for the voice of such a complicated writer as Su Shi M (1037-1 101). But it is useful to study Su as an individual even at this stage. Ultimately, it may be the only way to study him. His style and thought were highly individual; his individualism, and the ways he voiced it, have woven themselves so thoroughly into the tradition that by now he embodies the essence of an age into which he may not have fit particularly well while he was alive.

   Michael Fuller has made valiant progress at recovering parts of Su Shi's voice. Any Western scholar of this period would be wise to look through Fuller's book carefully. With its annotated translations of 103 of Su's poems and twenty-one by other writers, it shows how Su Shi's poetic approaches evolved from his youth into their mature form during his Huangzhou exile. Annotations are accurately written, Chinese characters copious, misprints few, and each poem is followed by an analysis that filters nine centuries of Chinese and Japanese commentary through a matrix of modern critical methods. This represents a leap for Su Shi's image in English, from the "Gay Genius" born out of hoary legend, directly to an elusive, cerebral, perhaps slightly de-constructed Su of paper and ink. (However, we should not forget the understated, big-hearted Su described by Yoshikawa, whose introduction to Su remains the best available in English: Kojiro Yoshikawa, trans. by Burton Watson, An Introduction to Sung Poetry [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 19671].) Fuller's book does not provide the final word on Su, nor will any book about this man who took flowing water as a leitmotif and found it pointless to try to identify "Mount Lu's true face." Still, Fuller's masses of data and opinions should help propel Western discussions about Su Shi closer toward the sophistication of the best Chinese commentators.

   The book cries out for a sequel: although Su Shi's poetry after Huangzhou has been labelled as the product of a decline in his powers, it deserves as much attention as any poetry in China. Huangzhou did not signal an end to Su's poetic development, as Fuller acknowledges, but was a turning point on the way to the quieter, subtler voice in which Su dipped tea-water from the river, and inscribed his own portrait. This lowering of the voice happens to so many artists, in all media, that it would be interesting to examine how it occurred in Su's case.

   Fuller's study is limited in scope as well as time. It deliberately excludes most of Su's ci and prose, focusing on shi poetry alone. Poems on paintings, religious verses, family poems and certain social poems are underrepresented in favor of those that treat landscape, history, or career. Su's voice bears less of the enthusiasm, warmth and love that posterity has seen in him; through much of the book he seems curiously distant, almost frigid. This may be a result of Fuller's methodology, which calls for the study of a voice rather than a man. But that is the author's prerogative, and it can be useful to look at Su in this way, without being reminded what a delightful neighbor or magistrate he must have made. More regrettable is the cluttered, half-digested impression the book presents, despite its convenient layout. Granted, with such a sprawling topic some untidiness is inevitable, even in a limited study. But this book could have become far more manageable, with a surer control of its subject, if the author had somewhere summarized or highlighted his principal argument instead of letting it flicker in and out among poems, biographical details, and dense theoretical thickets. That train of thought would also reveal itself better, with no loss in contents, if the book's text were reduced by about one-tenth.

   In order to clarify those contents, it may be helpful to try to summarize the main outline here:

   As Fuller sees it, Su Shi's poetic development meant learning how to think about, and put into words, the meeting of world and self " (p. 3). Because Su lived in the Song, in a world that made less sense than it had to Tang thinkers before the Tang's collapse, Su and other Song poets "labored under a burden of thought unknown in the Tang" (Qian Zhongshu's phrase, p. 41). Su's first models for exploring these thoughts in verse were experimenters such as Mei Yaochen, Ouyang Xiu, and Su Shunqin, but from the beginning his approach showed an individual streak that fit no mold. The young Su had an "active intelligence" that he allowed to flow over his topics with a "constantly varying approach" (pp. 48, 53). But those precocious, ever-shifting visions were unified by a conviction that beneath everything lay an "inherent pattern" (Fuller's excellent rendering of the word li [UNKNOWN TEXT OMITTED], usually translated as usually translated as principles"and associated with Zhu Xi). Water, whether in a duckpond or a river gorge, always accords with an inherent li, as do countless other phenomena. Su's early poetry, brash and erudite, is the manifestation of a search for ways to place both poet and poetry into a world that is at least partially understandable in terms of li. Poems written through Su Shi's first official post at Fengxiang, in his late twenties, show a poet dealing with landscapes and events in varying ways: sometimes it is hard to tell how much of a poem is landscape and how much is the poet reading the landscape. Throughout these experiments there runs a bold, energetic probing for meaning.

   After Wang Anshi's reform administration began, Su Shi served in the capital, where his attitude forced the new regime to teach him the lesson all cocksure young officials must learn (Wang Anshi had learned it already): Su was sent south to Hangzhou, to administer policies he disliked, forcing people to suffer under the laws he represented. As Su pondered how to survive in politics, he learned to enter into the official's role, and to treat poetry as one of his tools...