Informational Literature: The Pursuit of Empirical Accuracy in Song Literary Production

Abstract

Informational Literature:The Pursuit of Empirical Accuracy in Song Literary Production Mi Xiuyuan Empirical facts are accorded little importance in classical Chinese poetics. As is well known, the "Great Preface" of the Book of Songs defines poetry (shi 詩) as "that to which what is intently on the mind goes" (zhi zhi suozhi ye 志之所之也), and ascribes to the expression of emotions—the stirrings of the mind arising from the experience of a situation—a capacity to reveal both the poet's character and the social and political conditions of an age.1 This canonical outlook on poetry largely remained unchallenged until the mid-Tang, when a group of craftsmen-poets rose to prominence in the ashes of the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763). Living in the post-rebellion world beset with crises in cultural representations, some ninth-century poets, as Stephen Owen has observed, began to acknowledge "a temporal disjunction between the putative experience that occasioned the poem and the act of composition."2 While these poets aimed to create polished poetic scenes and were not interested in accurate representations, their innovative approach to writing ushered in an era during which poetry was gradually divorced from the cosmo-political order that used to define both its genesis and ultimate significance. Critical attention to poetry's factual accuracy first became noticeable around the mid-eleventh century. The new literary current, though distinct from the contemporaneous Ancient Style movement championed by the empire's most esteemed intellectuals, resulted from the same historical circumstances that necessitated a reorientation of the literary enterprise. Peter Bol has compellingly [End Page 305] demonstrated that elite learning since the eleventh century ceased to emphasize the mastery of literary forms, as the expansion of the civil examination system and the concomitant increase in educational opportunities transformed shi elite from hereditary aristocrats to scholar-officials, and then to local elites.3 Pushing back against the belletristic tradition characteristic of medieval aristocracy, the Ancient Style proponents, as Bol shows, sought to advance political and social transformations through morally engaged writing. And yet few critics and poets who valued empirical accuracy spoke of their literary commitment in political terms. Most of them were not as eminent as the advocates of the Ancient Style, and most of their comments were discursive. Early critics often discussed attentiveness to facts in light of Du Fu's 杜甫 (712–770) poems. As Du's popularity escalated after the most complete version of his poetry was printed in 1059, "poetry as chronicle" (shishi 詩史), an idea first associated with him in a late Tang commentary, also reentered the public view.4 Not resonating with the then-dominant idealist discourses and unexciting as a poetic ideal, empirical accuracy, merely one of the manifold interpretations of "poetry as chronicle," only garnered passing scholarly attention in the context of Du's reception.5 And yet, even within this limited scope of investigation, it is conceivable that the importance of facts in literary representations went beyond the criticism of a single poet. While Tang commentators established Du's reputation as a faithful recorder by virtue of his poems narrating the events following the An Lushan Rebellion, Song readers, no longer fixated on those turbulent years, enthusiastically approached his entire corpus as a repository of historical information.6 In fact, informativeness became a desirable literary quality across many [End Page 306] genres from the mid-eleventh century, and poetry was not an exception to this trend. Drawing on sightseeing accounts and river diaries, James Hargett has opined that Song travelers, unlike their predecessors, often wrote cinematically descriptive pieces and were disinclined to project personal emotions onto the landscape.7 In exploring the ways by which Southern Song literati availed themselves to the knowledge of the local past to create a shared cultural identity, Peter Bol points out that the compiler of the thirteenth-century cultural geography, Records of the Best Sites in the Realm 輿地紀勝 (1227), assumed that the specifics of locales were important to contemporary literary endeavors.8 Song literati seemed to have repositioned literature as a source of knowledge integral to their learning despite its declining practical importance after poetry was removed from the examinations in the 1070s. And this new literary vista...