Du Fu Transforms: Tradition and Ethics amid Societal Collapse by Lucas Rambo Bender

Abstract

Reviewed by: Du Fu Transforms: Tradition and Ethics amid Societal Collapse by Lucas Rambo Bender Ji Hao Du Fu Transforms: Tradition and Ethics amid Societal Collapse. By Lucas Rambo Bender. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2021. xiii+ 411 pp. $65.00. Recent years have witnessed a considerable growth of interest in Du Fu 杜甫 (712–770) studies in the Anglophone world. In addition to Stephen Owen's first complete English translation of Du Fu's poetry, a number of scholarly works have explored various aspects of Du Fu and his poetry through a diverse array of topics that shed new light on this arguably China's greatest poet and his lasting legacy. Lucas Bender's book Du Fu Transforms is a very welcome addition to the field, and it carries special significance in the context of contemporary studies on classical Chinese poets. In their examination of classical Chinese poets, scholars tend to adopt one of the following two lines of inquiry: either they have attempted to put the poets back to their "original" world and thus show an alternative understanding(s) of the poets, or they have endeavored to demonstrate how the poets came to us by focusing on the reception of these poets and their works. While Bender's book largely centers on the world in which Du Fu lived, it also clearly shows the author's effort to create a dialogue between these two lines of inquiry through a careful analysis of the trajectory of Du Fu's life and poetry and its relationship with two different models of readings, namely, the late medieval model before and during Du Fu's lifetime and the "recordizing" model that prevailed in the postmedieval period. The introduction sets out the main arguments of the book and highlights the contrast between two different modes of sense-making between the late medieval period (6th–8th century) and the recordizing paradigm (since the Song dynasty). Such a contrast points to the shifting ethical significance of poetry, which is exemplified by two prefaces written by Lu Zhaolin 盧照鄰 (ca. 634–684) and Qiu Zhaoao 仇兆鰲 (1638–1717), respectively. Whereas Lu's preface embraces the role of the cultural and literary tradition in providing "the key epistemological ground for moral understanding" (p.14), Qiu's writing underscores the role of the external world in understanding Du Fu's poetry and its ethical values. As Bender argues, the evolution of Du Fu's poetry allows him to mediate these two modes of reading or sense-making, and such a pivotal role is also closely associated with his own changing life experience before and after the outbreak of the An Lushan Rebellion. Bender suggests that Du Fu has played an active role in this transformative process, and the title of his book Du Fu Transforms clearly acknowledges the poet's agency. To illustrate how Du Fu transforms, Bender's book traces the trajectory of Du Fu's [End Page 173] poetry through seven successive stages of his life, each of which is addressed in a separate chapter. Chapter 1 begins with Du Fu's early poems before 755 and further explains the differences between the two aforementioned modes of reading poetry: while the late medieval readers relied more on intuitive appreciation as they could derive their hermeneutic confidence from the overarching literary and cultural tradition, recordizing critics put more emphasis on individuals and particular historical situations in their search for the "correct" meaning and the moral import of poetry. Through the analysis of selected poems of Du Fu from this period, Bender has demonstrated that Du Fu's earliest writings largely conform to the late medieval model, a model that Du Fu began to question in the face of the imminent threat of the An Lushan Rebellion which eventually broke out at the end of 755. Moving to Du Fu's poems written in 755, Chapter 2 addresses another important issue in the reception of Du Fu: how to interpret Du Fu's poems, especially those expressing his frustrations, from right before the Rebellion? Here again, the late medieval model has been juxtaposed with the recordizing model in Bender's discussion. For the latter, Du Fu's poems...