Zhou Mi And His Writings In The Literary Stage Between The Song And The Yuan

This dissertation examines in basic terms the biji writings and poetry of the noted late Southern Song/early Yuan literatus Zhou Mi. My aims in have been twofold: firstly, to establish the importance of biji in the literary scene of the Southern Song, especially in terms of their impact on other forms of literary expression, and secondly, to demonstrate by a study of Zhou Mi’s large oeuvre the formation of his style as a biji writer, and, through these experiences, his distinct poetic philosophy.In the first chapter I am concerned with positioning biji as a ’high’ style of literary expression with intimate connections to some basic questions of what literature is. Whereas the comparative study of’Eastern’or’Western’poetry, for example, finds an abundance of characters in either culture from which similarities and differences can be inferred, an approach that so often defines Chinese writers in Western terminology, no such framework exists for biji writers. Though we may be grateful for this insofar as no great western’biji writer’has been found to complement and thereby romanticise the great Chinese tradition, there is, I argue, a deeper irony at work that only comes out through the comparative perspective. This first chapter holds that the proliferation of biji writing in China reflects a written culture and literati tradition that was often far in advance of anything in the contemporary West, the influences of which are far-reaching in terms of the influence of biji, in its various formats on the literary tradition as a whole. On the broader comparative level, if we are to look at literary formation in its material attributes in China and in the West, almost any form is itself result of the patient collection and sorting of information and its presentation in a stylized manner. In fact, as work on the encyclopedia of fifteen century England has argued, the question of the essential’truth’or’myth’behind the collection would be established after the fact, and was understood more as an interchange than a strict dividing line-hence the tendency, for example, the early theatre to be seen as an encyclopedia of life.Looking beyond simple comparisons between the West and China, this First Chapter proceeds to stress the embedded nature of encylopedic knowledge - and the resulting discrimination between the high and the low, the elevated and the vulgar-in any written or oral culture. The point has been made memorably by Levi-Strauss [La Pensee Sauvage] but its essential relevance to the definition of biji leads us in a number of exciting directions. It is possible to discuss early historical writing in China and Ancient Greece, for example, or the collections of sayings of early philosophers in both camps, in line with some related and broader comparative ideals. I discuss in this first chapter how a literary style, presentation and a definite level of’spin’is integral to any writing process longer than, say, the unfiltered expression of a poem or song, and use this as a hermeneutic approach for different writing traditions within any one culture. The phenomenon of the pure biji, entails a similar organizing of fiction and fact (noting in this respect the tendency in China for traditions of encyclopedic writing to shift between fictional forms-the’stories of the strange’in Southern Dynasties and Tang China - and later factual styles), as well as the passions of the writer, and seems integral to a style of literary expression that is in many ways one that is more natural a part of intellectual culture than even poetry. Yet, again ironically, it is the’higher’, disinterested and self-referential nature of so much of this writing that confines it to often a single time period and a select few erudites. In China, where the literati tradition was able to survive quite miraculously with its cultural identity intact, it is clear that this style would be able to evolve into new directions given the proper timing of advances in written culture and general interest of intellectual classes in biji. In the West, however, though the roots of such a tradition can be found in the jottings of Aulus Gellius and Aelian (late second to early third century A.D.), it is the rise of Christianity and the re-orientation of intellectuals to the public domain, away from seedy Hellenism, that nips this tradition in the bud. Still, if we keep our eye fixed on the principles behind the formation of biji as anthropological structures that have not largely been absorbed in western scholarship- at least above the level of the’savage mind’ - it is possible to see how the tradition lingered on and saw new life in Byzantine histories, encylopedias, written traditions evolving in Eastern Europe at the end of the first millennium A.D. (most notably in Armenia, Bulgaria and later Kievan Rus) before feeding into the literary mindset of what would become Western European encyclopaedic, and literary traditions.With biji writing having such a complicated genealogy, how might a history of this literary form be written? And how might we evaluate the presence of biji in a thriving culture of poem and lyric-verse such as the Southern Song? I take up this question in the second chapter, which argues for interpreting the writings of the Southern Song as embodying a self-contained tradition of new biji writing. Partly the rise of this new biji style is attributable to the radically different postures adopted by literati in the Southern Song capital Lin’an (Hangzhou) vis-a-vis the state and the maturity of literary activities which could be recorded and immortalized in the biji format. But the heart of the question seems to revolve around the questions that this ’class’faced as Northern Song culture was transplanted to the south, translated, redefined and in a sense relived. Different from their predecessors in the Northern Song, literati operating between officialdom and a private sphere of writing were able to take biji into new and exciting territory, in what I call the’small traditions’of writing about the lands and characters of the south, the new and distinct culture of imperial rule in Jiangnan, and an increasingly detailed and biographical narration of literati life itself.It is interesting to note that, despite the rise of southern forms of biji writing, the poetic life of so many literati remained engrained in learning from Northern Song and earlier Tang masters. Despite, furthermore, the deeply private nature of biji writing, the sociability and networking that came with the job for the most part secures an agreeable tension exists between the poetic side of literature and the other traditions, including the painterly, that by the thirteenth century basically co-exist with it. A decisive break with the past, however, occurs with the surge of writing by disenfranchised scholars in the south, whom later research has classed with the umbrella term of the’Jianghu School’. The biji tradition, which hitherto had operated comfortably on the bounds of Southern Song literary, philosophic and social tensions, was with the rise of this’School’forced to take a drastic turn inward. In my third chapter, I show how Zhou Mi’s approach to the poetic past represented one aspect of this shift, as he self-consciously selected poetry which adhered to a romanticized idea of the south, heartland of imperial as well as a high literati culture. Similar viewpoints are expressed time and time again in Zhou Mi’s various recollections of late Southern Song Lin’an and in collections of anecdotes on the scholarly traditions and developments in the south. This chapter is to my mind the most important section of the dissertation; at present considerable work is needed to strengthen the argument with evidence from Zhou Mi’s writings on the painterly tradition, not to mention a closer re-reading of Zhou’s vast oeuvre.Finally, I show in the fourth chapter how Zhou crafted his response to the Jianghu school in redefining the south as aesthetic through selecting writing about sites around Lin’an, especially in the vicinity of West Lake, as the new sine qua non for qualification as a poet. I am interested in showing both the aesthetic tastes of this late Southern Song/early Yuan figure as representing an early form of the painterly and poetic tradition that would thrive in the Yuan, but also in demonstrating how so much of this grows from Zhou Mi’s passions as a biji writer and his sharing of them with groups of elite literati friends. The emergence of this tradition prior to the fourteenth century realignment of Chinese tastes, poetic as well as literary in general, seems to me an important facet that can at least partly be explained by the earlier rise of biji traditions in the Southern Song, and their transformation along these lines at the end of that dynasty.