Drifting Among Rivers and Lakes: Southern Song Dynasty Poetry and the Problem of Literary History by Michael A. Fuller

Abstract

Reviewed by: Drifting Among Rivers and Lakes: Southern Song Dynasty Poetry and the Problem of Literary History by Michael A. Fuller Graham Sanders Michael A. Fuller. Drifting Among Rivers and Lakes: Southern Song Dynasty Poetry and the Problem of Literary History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. Pp. 526. $60 (cloth). ISBN 978-0674073227. The Song dynasty is an era, perhaps more so than any other in Chinese history, in which the discussion amongst the literati of the role of patterned written language (wen 文) in society reached new levels of urgency. How does written language express the mind in relation to the world? How is it received and evaluated by others? How does it relate to the cosmos of which it is a part? In this book, Michael Fuller has drawn a clear and detailed picture of the how these questions (and many more) were being asked and answered during the transition from the Northern to the Southern Song, when the very foundations of knowledge were up for debate. The result is a masterful work of scholarship that simultaneously tackles the practice and theory of poetry in China from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries and the problem of trying to write a literary history of that time. The challenge of writing a history of any kind is the question of how to juxtapose the particular and the general in a way that respects the specificity of the particulars while also rendering an intelligible narrative that seeks to elucidate patterns in the relations among particulars. It is an impossible task—there are degrees of success but never complete success. Fuller's account is highly successful in that he makes the terms, parameters, and assumptions that ground his project crystal clear over the course of a five-hundred-page book that is packed with both historical detail and philosophical insight. The Introduction, "Casting Off: A Theoretical Introduction," concisely lays the philosophical groundwork for the rest of the book. Drawing upon Kant's notion of "aesthetic judgment" as a kind of "reflective judgment" that gives one "an intuition of order about a particular object" (20), Fuller defines "the literary" as "the aesthetic organizing of language" (which would serve as a good definition of the Chinese term wen). As observers of the empirical world—including its instantiations of language—we have a sense of what parts of that world are related to one another according to a larger principle, which is often not directly apparent to us. This admits a rather generous notion of the literary, for the aesthetic judgment lies not solely in the fashioner of literary words, but also (perhaps primarily?) in the one who receives them. This means, according to Fuller, "as long as some linguistic utterance is a work that is (or has been) the object of aesthetic experience, it is part of literary [End Page 309] history" (12). This, of course, leads one to ask, what constitutes "aesthetic experience"? To be of any use in the practice of literary history, the notion of aesthetic experience must be historically grounded. In a deft summary of Adorno's view on the "material particularity" of art, Fuller states: "This materiality returned art to history, but history inhered not only in the techniques through which the work was created but also in the play of categories through which the artwork attained its appearance of unity and its status as art" (26). In other words, aesthetic judgments are always made in history using categories that mean something to particular historical actors in given places and times. These actors will often posit the idea of universal and changeless categories of meaning that they imagine transcend their historical moment. In a tantalizing but brief section on the "cognitive turn" (14–18), Fuller suggests that such enduring categories might have a biological basis in the mind but defers further discussion of the issue as being beyond the scope of his book. The danger of looking back at aesthetic judgments made centuries ago in an entirely different culture is that modern critics make their interpretations based on their own assumed categories of meaning. Fuller readily acknowledges that "we cannot hope to entirely understand the discursive and wider...