Defining the Sovereign Body

Abstract

REVIEW ARTICLE DEFINING THE SOVEREIGN BODY MICHAEL A. FULLER University of California, Irvine, USA JACK W. CHEN, The Poetics of Sovereignty: On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty. Harvard-Yenching Monograph Series 71. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010. xvii z 445 pp. Jack W. Chen’s Poetics of Sovereignty is an ambitious study of Tang Taizong’s corpus of texts and its roles in the political and cultural transformations of the Zhenguan era. Chen is ambitious on three levels. First, he makes strong claims for the role Taizong’s writings played in shaping his rule. Secondly, Chen examines texts that have been explored by major scholars of Tang history and literature writing in English and offers new interpretations within a distinctive analytic framework. Finally, he seeks to broaden this framework to include hermeneutic perspectives that make it accessible to scholars of European traditions. While Chen does not fully succeed in all aspects of this ambitious program, his accomplishments remain significant and are an important contribution to our thinking about the role of literary practice in middle-period Chinese culture and society. OVERVIEW Because the Poetics of Sovereignty is long and carefully argued, it perhaps is best first to present an overview of the book as a whole — with my comments along the way — and then turn briefly in conclusion to discuss a key issue — the sovereign body — that runs throughout the study. The structure of the monograph is essentially concentric rings that build layer upon layer of context before reaching Taizong’s ‘‘Imperial Palace Poems’’ in the final chapter. Each chapter in turn follows the same pattern: for each type of writing that is the focus of the chapter — whether it is Taizong’s prose discussions of the art of rulership in Chapter 2 or his fu on the Daming Palace in Chapter 6 — Chen presents an historic overview of discursive precedents and approaches within which to explore the significance of Taizong’s own work in the genre. Chen lays the conceptual groundwork in the introduction, where he sets out the book’s central thesis about the substantive role of cultural production in Taizong’s strategy for rule: It is my broad contention that for Taizong — and for the concept of sovereignty in general — the political sphere was inextricable from the sphere Tang Studies, 30. 70–85, 2012 # T’ang Studies Society 2012 DOI: 10.1179/0737503412Z.0000000004 of cultural production. To this end, I will argue that cultural production is not subordinate to the political, that it is not simply part of the ideological superstructure that serves to legitimate the true operations of power. (3) Chen is most interested not in culture generally but in the literary in particular: My focus here, however, will be on Taizong’s literary writings, specifically those that speak directly to the relationship between cultural form and sovereign power, as well as on the question of how the Tang negotiated dynastic identity through literary stylistics. For Taizong, literature was central to the establishment and consolidation of empire because it was in the space of literature that both the empire and the emperor could be imagined — that is, articulated and represented as images. (4) As noted above, these are strong claims for the role of the literary, and the burden of the study is to validate these claims. The first chapter discusses Taizong’s effort to shape the historiography of his reign. Raising this issue at the very beginning of the study allows Chen to present the basic historical facts as we know them concerning Taizong’s contributions to the founding of the Tang, the ‘‘Xuanwu Gate Incident,’’ and Taizong’s consolidation of rule during the Zhenguan reign period. He also discusses the revisionist trends in historiography that have restored Li Yuan’s role in the Taiyuan uprising and the founding of the dynasty. Chen draws in part upon Howard Wechsler’s chapter on the founding of the Tang in the Cambridge History of China and his account in Mirror to the Son of Heaven that describes Taizong’s efforts to interfere with his court historians’ work. In Chapter Two, ‘‘On Sovereignty and Representation,’’ Chen continues to explore Taizong’s efforts to control his...