Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere: Gardens and Objects in Tang-Song Poetry.

• Author: Fuller, Michael A.
• Position: Book Review

Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere: Gardens and Objects in Tang-Song Poetry. By XIAOSHAN YANG. Harvard East Asian Monographs, no. 225. Cambridge, Mass: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, 2003. Pp. 301. $45.

Yang Xiaoshan, true to his subtitle, presents a solid, workmanlike survey of how Chinese literati writers of shi poetry during the Tang and Song dynasties treated the themes of gardens and of objects (e.g., rock and cranes) likely to be found in gardens. He further draws upon a wealth of material to establish both the earlier precedents for his selected poems and the social and historical contexts within which those poems were written.

I highly recommend Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere to any scholar who seeks an overview of the theme of gardens and garden objects in Chinese poetry. However, most readers who open the book seeking an in-depth study of the conceptual and cultural issues presented in the main title--i.e., the development of a literati private sphere--will be disappointed. One should, I think, take the book for what it is rather than what it (somewhat half-heartedly) claims to be; the poetic and historical research it presents is useful even if its conceptual scaffolding is weak.

The book's first chapter focuses on the mid-Tang poet and high official Bai Juyi (772-846) and on his garden and his poems on gardens. The chapter introduces the appropriate lore on gardens in the earlier poetic tradition and the various approaches to ownership available through that tradition. To mid-Tang writers, the vicissitudes of grand urban gardens reflected the delusions of those who rejoiced in worldly power, yet rural retreats embodied an eremitic stance they simply could not embrace. Hence Bai developed the idea of the garden owned by the "middling hermit" who rejected the extremes of reclusion and of pretension to reclusion while in office.

The second chapter discusses urban private gardens in greater detail. It explores the problem of "naturalness" and of the representational character of the space defined by such gardens. Chapters three and four examine the status of the objects the literati put in their gardens. Foremost were the fantastic rocks from Lake Tai, which became all the rage in mid-Tang and later served as yet one more emblem of the obsessional delusions of those who think they can evade the inevitability of change and loss. Yang discusses the fetish for rocks and fetishism in general in both the earlier tradition and in mid-Tang practice...