Pan Yue's 'Study of a Widow' and its predecessors.

• Author: Williams, Nicholas Morrow

This article is a case study in the intertextuality of early medieval Chinese poetry, where the imitation of and allusion to earlier works is the focus of the author's craft and the catalyst of literature's emotional power. The study proceeds by analyzing the intertextual relation between a late third-century fu [??] about a widow and its early third-century predecessors, showing how they are linked both by generic constraints and direct allusion and imitation, all of which together tend to create in these works a limiting formality and artificiality. Yet their very formality assists in the expression of emotion and the constitution of authorial subjectivity. Finally, two modern counterparts with their own allusive relationship shed further light on the literary representation of widowhood.

As with much medieval Chinese literature, the textual relationships of interest in Pan Yue's fu are for the most part not allusions, in the sense of specific references to earlier texts, although there are many such classical allusions. What is even more striking is the pervasive use of shared language: phrases, lines, and even larger structures. The term "intertextuality" seems most appropriate to designate these shared usages. (1) Though the texts under discussion in this article include an explicit attempt at imitation, this imitation blends together with classical allusions and repetitions of other texts. Intertextuality here is used to include all these textual linkages, regardless of whether any particular example of shared language was intended to be recognized as such. It is the overall pattern, regulating both the macroscopic structure and local details, that deserves to be termed intertextuality. A close reading of a few poems from the third century C.E. can suggest some of the larger cultural implications of this intertextuality. (2)

The principal text under examination here is the "Study of a Widow" [??] (3) by Pan Yue [??] (247-300), one of several fu by Pan that are preserved in the great sixth-century anthology Wen xuan [??]. (4) Based on a biographical sketch, one would not expect to find tender depictions of grief in Pan Yue's oeuvre. (5) His behavior as a lackey to Shi Chong [??] (249-300) and Jia Mi [??] (?-300) has long been denounced, in particular the treasonous letter he drafted, which was falsely attributed to Sima Yu [??] (d. 300), Crown Prince Minhuai [??]. (6) But his numerous funerary compositions, including both public court pieces and more intimate ones mourning his own wife and children, are also noteworthy. This aspect of his achievement was already recognized in his Jin shu biography, which comments that he "excelled particularly in composing laments and dirges." (7) Not only does he have fu and poems lamenting his wife and others, but also numerous compositions in the genres of epitaphs, lamentations, offerings, and dirges. To give just one example of their popularity, the Wen xuan includes four separate dirges by him. His poems mourning his wife and children are especially moving, and have been the subject of two valuable essays. (8) Here I want to consider Pan's "Study of a Widow," which is not an account of his own loss, but a proso-popoeia, or literary impersonation, in the voice of the widow of a friend. Perhaps this distancing device was one reason that this fu was one of those deemed appropriate for inclusion in the Wen xuan (unlike "Mourning the Departed" [??] for his own wife, for instance). It has more of the formality and general scope of other fu selected for the anthology.

Pan Yue wrote the fu after the death of his friend Ren Hu [??]. The two friends were doubly linked, since they had been close friends since childhood, and Ren Hu's wife was the younger sister of Pan Yue's wife. Thus Ren Hu's death broke up not only his own family, but also Pan Yue's, and the fu is, among other things, a moving response to Ren's death. Lu Kanru [??] has convincingly dated the fu to 276 based on two pieces of evidence. (9) On the one hand, the preface mentions that Ren's wife, whose father was Yang Zhao [??], was already an orphan at the time of composition, and Yang had died in 275. On the other hand, since Ren Hu died around the age of 20, and was a childhood friend of Pan, the fu cannot have been written much later.

The preface sets out the context of the fu in two sections, one on the personal context (Ren's death) and one on the literary context defining the form of the composition (the fu's predecessors): (10)

Ren Zixian of Le'an was a man whose capacity would have swept the world. (11) From youth we enjoyed a friendship that fraternal love could not have surpassed. Tragically he died at capping age. (12) What grief can compare with the passing of a good friend? Furthermore, his wife was my wife's younger sister. She lost both of her parents when she was young, and now after her marriage, her whole "heaven" has also perished. (13) Ren's now-fatherless daughter is very small, only just beginning to smile. (14) This is the greatest calamity of human life, and the ultimate anguish of all human suffering. [??] Up to this point in the preface we have a straightforward human story. A young man dies, leaving a grief-stricken wife, herself an orphan, and a daughter. (15) The widow's suffering is set in the context of a series of deaths that affect everyone in her extended family. Extending the scope of the fu even further, it is "the greatest calamity" and "the ultimate anguish." We can already see the how the fu depicts the widow's suffering as a representative of grief in general.

Pan Yue then places the fu in a context that extends beyond the present moment, back to the experiences of widows in the past and their literary representation:

Long ago when Ruan Yu passed away, Emperor Wen of Wei mourned him, and commanded his friends to compose fu for his widow. I have imitated these, to relate the feelings of those rendered fatherless or widowed. [??] Here Pan Yue is referring to a well-known event in Jian'an [??] (196-220) history. After the death of Ruan Yu [??] (165?-212), later known as one of the Seven Masters of the Jian'an period, Cao Pi [??] (187-226) commanded that several members of the court write fu on behalf of his widow. Thus the immediate situation and the literary composition portraying it are set in the context of similar situations and poems from the past. As will be shown below, these kinds of intertextual references define the body of the fu as well. Though all the typical reasons for allusion and imitation are relevant here, the final sentence of the preface also identifies a particular significance in the intertextuality of this fu: the motive to describe the feelings of "those rendered fatherless and widowed" in general, not just Ren Hu's wife and daughter.

I translate the term gu gua [??] in the last sentence as "those rendered fatherless or widowed" rather than "the lonely widow" because of the concern throughout the preface not just with widows but also with orphanhood. When gu occurs earlier in the preface it used to refer to the daughter Zelan, who has just lost her father, and not to the widow. The concepts of "widow" and "orphan" in modern English are mutually exclusive, since a widow's child is by definition not an orphan as long as her mother lives. (16) In classical Chinese gu is ambiguous, and can be used for a child who lost just a father, or just a mother, or both, so widowhood and orphanhood would frequently coincide. (17) It makes sense given the tendency of the fu genre towards comprehensiveness that the widow fu would expand to encompass the suffering of the surviving children as well.

In fact, we could question whether the topic of "Study of a Widow" is primarily widowhood itself. The perspective is that of all the survivors after a death, encompassing the children of the deceased, and even the poet and other friends. Although the widow is the nominal topic, her role in the fu approaches that of an occasion for composition more than an actual subject. Much of the content of the fu would be equally apposite to Pan Yue's own situation as mourner. It is worth noting that gu and gua belong to a set of words that can refer either to specific bereavement or to isolation more generally. The other two are guan [??] for "widower" and du [??] for "an aged person without children." (18) Du in fact occurs four times in the fu, not of course in this specific sense but in the broader one of "alone," "without support." Guan of course is not used in the fu, but as explained in the preface, Pan Yue does to some degree share in the widow's sense of bereavement. Thus the subject matter of the fu expands from widowhood towards bereavement and isolation in general, which in the traditional Chinese context is often equivalent with the severing of family ties.

The recounting of personal experience we expect from the first part of the preface, as well as the attempt at a comprehensive portrayal of a topic suggested in the latter part, both have precedent in the history of the fu. These conflicting tendencies are present in the Chuci [??] anthology itself, which contains some of the earliest examples of fu, though not identified as such within the anthology. (19) David Hawkes suggested a basic division of the thematic content of the anthology into tristia, the poems of frustration and regret, and itineraria, the poems of journeys, both mystical and geographical. (20) But many Chuci poems do not really belong in either category, being primarily descriptive, on either a grand or an intimate scale. (21) The former kind is exemplified by the "Summons" poems, "Summoning the Soul" [??] and "The Great Summons" [??], and their epideictic description of a

variety of court settings. The other class of fu is also descriptive, but on a lesser scale; it is the genre which begins with the "Ode to the Orange Tree" [??] in the Chuci, (22) the inspiration for many later yongwu fu...