Two Approaches to Reexamining the Writings of Wang Anshi (1021-1086).

• Author: Fuller, Michael

In discussing the writings of Wang Anshi, scholars confront a distinct historical problem. As chief councilor to Song Emperor Shenzong (r. 1067-1085), Wang Anshi promulgated a series of extremely controversial policies, collectively known as the New Policies, through which the state intervened in the economy to raise funds to support its chronic military expenses. Even after Wang's retirement, the factional strife that he provoked persisted. Later historians and writers blamed the cycles of partisan suppression and counter-suppression that wracked the governance of the next two emperors for the fall of the Northern Song dynasty when the Jurchens conquered north China in 1127. In the Southern Song dynasty, founded after the debacle of the collapse of the North, the antireformist consensus concerning Wang Anshi's alleged role in the loss of the north strongly shaped what texts survived and how histories were written. As Ari Levine notes about the collected writings of the period,

Since the distribution and survival of the corpus of collected works (wenji) of the late Northern Song authors has been skewed by political and ideological factors, very few editions of reformist-authored collected works are now extant, while those of antireformists now number in the dozens. (1) In a similar manner, antireformist political and ideological values distorted the historiography of Wang Anshi's life and Shenzong's reign. Charles Hartman, in his careful study of the major late Northern Song, Southern Song, and Yuan dynasty historical works documenting the period of the New Policies and its aftermath, focuses on how a combination of partisan politics and antireformist commitments shaped historians' material and narratives at every step of the process of constructing the histories of the era. (2)

The challenge for contemporary scholars examining Wang Anshi's writings--and his literary writings in particular--thus is the unreliability of the interpretive framework of collateral textual collections and late imperial scholarship that typically inform our reading of the texts. As Jonathan Pease notes below, the anecdotes about Wang's writings and about Wang himself are largely scurrilous, and commentaries that rely on the skewed historical documentation discover political allegories at every turn. How should a circumspect scholar approach such a complex interpretive tangle? Offering very different answers with very different goals, the two books under review define distinctive stances in drawing upon the extant sources. Each is largely successful within its approach, and comparing the two books offers us material for methodological reflection.

Jonathan Pease and Yang Xiaoshan are scholars very well versed in the primary texts and secondary literature on Wang Anshi, yet they take almost opposite approaches to that material. In Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture, Yang Xiaoshan serves as a genial, knowledgeable guide through a hermeneutic landscape dotted with the local coloration of debates from commentaries on Wang Anshi that have accumulated over the centuries: an unresolvable textual problem here, a much-contested interpretive issue there. In contrast, Jonathan Pease, who completed his dissertation on Wang Anshi's life and poetry in 1986, writes as a senior scholar who has meditated on Wang Anshi over a long career, and who, in His Stubbornship: Prime Minister Wang Anshi (1021-1086), Reformer and Poet, offers his highly personalized account of Wang's life and poetry.

WANG ANSHI AND SONG POETIC CULTURE

Yang Xiaoshan's Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture, although much shorter than His Stubbornship, is harder to discuss because the ambling structure of its chapters makes simple synopses difficult. Yang's goals are very modest:

The present book is conceived of largely as a series of case studies. The chapters may be read independently of each other, but together they form a varied (if only partial) mosaic of Wang's work and its critical receptions in the context of Song poetic culture. Chronology serves as a general organizing principle of my presentation, although the book is not biographical in nature, with information about Wang's official and personal life provided only when necessary to contextualize the issues under discussion, (p. 5) The book is comprised of five loose-jointed essays--the first two of which are expansions of earlier articles--a coda, and an epilogue. The first chapter, on Wang Anshi's two poems "Song of Brilliant Lady," sets out the information needed to assess the controversies surrounding the poems but refrains from offering any strong judgment. (3) I look at this chapter in some detail to convey Yang's general strategies. Yang begins by introducing the sad fate of Wang Zhaojun, the Han dynasty palace lady sent off to marry a Xiongnu ruler, a story that had been a topic of poetry for centuries. Wang Anshi concludes the first of his two poems on Wang Zhaojun with the couplet:

[phrase omitted] Haven't you seen how Ajiao was confined [phrase omitted] in the nearby Tall Gate Palace? (4) [phrase omitted] In life's disappointment, there is no south or north, (p. 15) That is, while Wang Zhaojun's fate in being married to a Xiongnu and enduring life in the North was pitiable, there were those who remained within the palace who also met with isolation, disappointment, and sorrow. In the second song, Wang provides the complementary observation that, rejected by the Han, Wang Zhaojun was esteemed by the Xiongnu and that

[phrase omitted] Han's favor was shallow and the barbarian's deep; [phrase omitted] The joy of life is to know each other's heart, (p. 16) Yang's analysis centers on the attacks on Wang Anshi over the traitorous sentiments he expressed in these couplets. Yang introduces the controversy through a colophon by Huang Tingjian and then proceeds to writers from the Southern Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties who either damned Wang or defended him. Only after telling this story does Yang discuss the series of poems composed by major writers contemporary with Wang Anshi, who enthusiastically matched "Song of Brilliant Lady" in their verse. As Yang explains, these writers found no problem with Wang's two poems. The rather obvious conclusion to be drawn from Yang's evidence is that the controversy was a late phenomenon that arose through a confluence of (1) Wang Anshi's reputation as the man who unleashed factional strife through the intolerance with which he treated opponents to his radical New Policies, (2) the overthrow of the Northern Song by the Jurchens, for which Wang and his followers were held responsible, and (3) a significant narrowing of the idea of loyalty that was part of the conservative moralism of the "Learning of the Way." (5) Yet Yang resists reaching this conclusion: instead, in the final paragraph he argues, "to be sure, the controversy has been perpetuated by political and moral prejudice. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that Wang's sensational lines are a cause of legitimate concerns about moral propriety and good taste" (p. 61). This gesture of accommodation to late imperial and modern views can be justified on the Gadamerian grounds that Yang lives within the continuity of an "effective history" shaped by late imperial perspectives, but it strengthens the sense that he sees his role as that of a guide calling attention to points of interest which he treats simply as given elements of the scholarly landscape. I should stress that he is an excellent guide--he knows the terrain well, and the terrain is interesting--but we remain tourists.

In the second essay, on Wang Anshi's compilation of the Selections from a Hundred Tang Poets (Tang baijia shixuan), Yang again leads...