5 Self-Portrait as Sea Anemone, and Other Impersonations of Jiang Yan

Abstract

Jiang Yan (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) (444-505) is famous for his melancholy fu and poems of imitation modeled after earlier writers. This study aims to relate these two types of compositions by tracing Jiang's use of impersonation, as he borrows voices of other writers, historical figures, and even animals and plants. Though we can place Jiang's works in narrative arc of his official career, rhetorical substitutions of his poems also displace them from that very biography. At same time, his habit of presenting himself through alter egos seems to reflect something unique to his character. Jiang's Fu on Bitter Regret sums up various tendencies of his work, combining impersonations of historical figures to form universal depiction of frustrated expression. At end of his life, mysterious case of writer's block was fitting denouement to literary career defined all along by self -concealment.The defining technique of Jiang Yan's(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) (444-505) mature works is literary impersonation, substitution of other voices for his own. The most prominent examples of this technique are his imitation poems, modeled after works of earlier poets, but even in his poems not explicitly identified as imitations, Jiang Yan frequently adopts an alien persona. His literary impersonation of animals, plants, historical figures, and other poets is related to classical Greco-Roman trope of prosopopoeia. Prosopopoeia was often used as literary exercise - student being assigned historical figure, for example, in whose voice to compose speech. Its function as rhetorical device was thus comparatively narrow, but its larger implications are already suggested in Quintilian's description of its utility for various purposes of persuading, rebuking, complaining, praising, or condoling.1Prosopopoeia thus can take on many of ordinary functions of literature, which raises question of whether there is any fundamental difference between writing in voice of another and writing of oneself. Paul de Man goes so far as to call prosopopoeia the trope of autobiography.2 He sees autobiographical as a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts,3 yet because it is only figure or representation, always fails in some sense to speak for self. Prosopopoeia is thus rhetorical manifestation of this more fundamental dilemma. For Jiang Yan prosopopoeia has different but parallel kind of ambivalence. The correspondences between objects of impersonation and his own self-conception are obvious and sometimes explicit, but trope of prosopopoeia negates their autobiographical import. His beautiful laments about impossibility of self-fulfillment are couched in voices of others, denying himself that fulfillment on yet another, rhetorical level.There is an important strain of prosopopoeia in earlier Chinese literature, particularly in Chuci and fu, in which construction of an alternate persona is employed for expressive purposes. A revealing case is Fisherman (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) story of Qu Yuan's encounter with fisherman recluse who mocks his ambitions. Though modern scholarship questions attribution of this and other works to Qu Yuan himself, that traditional attribution would render fisherman literary construct author uses to challenge character who bears his own name. Outside of Chuci, another prominent example of prosopopoeia occurs in one of first proper fu compositions, where Jia Yi (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) (201-169 BCE) writes of being visited by an owl that sighs and flaps its wings at him. Jia Yi takes this as kind of consolation, and recites long speech that replies with thoughts (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) of bird, advising Daoist indifference to worldly affairs. …