Tao Yuanming & Manuscript Culture: The Record of a Dusty Table (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tao Yuanming & Manuscript Culture: The Record of a Dusty Table Zhu Mei (bio) Xiaofei Tian . Tao Yuanming & Manuscript Culture: The Record of a Dusty Table. Seattle, London: University of Washington Press, 2005. x, 319 pp. Hardcover $60.00, ISBN 0-295-98553-4. This book is concerned with Tao Yuanming (365?-427) and his manuscripts. In their leisurely mood and casual style, Tao Yuanming's poems exemplify the harmony between Chinese people and nature-the essence of "Chinese art." Tao Yuanming's renowned series of five poems "Returning to Dwell in Gardens and Fields" (Gui yuan tian ju), in which the poet gives up his profession for the life of a farm recluse, is an ideal to which many Chinese poets and intellectuals in social turmoil would subsequently aspire. Until now, he has generally been held up as a loyal subject by specialists and non-specialists. In this book, Tian suggests that the "authentic" texts through which we have interpreted Tao may not be trustworthy. The audience of Tao Yuanming has been led astray by editorial "reproduction" of Tao's text and must be warned against them. By examining the historical, social, cultural, and literary context in which Tao Yuanming was deeply embedded, along with the ideological discourses of commentators, Tian presents to us an elusive, innovative, and playful Tao Yuanming, who is primarily a writer rather than a recluse. She claims that we have misunderstood Tao as "the archetypal recluse" (p. 12) by relying on the Song image of the poet, along with the partial knowledge of earlier interpreters. Tian's reading demonstrates that contrary to the belief that Tao's works manifest a deep sense of sufficiency, calm, and arrogance, they instead betray the sorrow, fear, and restlessness in his heart. Moreover, instead of being plain and artless, Tao Yuanming's works are highly self-conscious, even performative. They never articulate any systematic thoughts. Essential to this conflicting image of Tao is, according to Tian, the "fluidity of the medieval Chinese textual world and how its materials were historically reconfigured for later purposes," that is, "the problems of manuscript culture" (p. 220). Tian's book not only changes our view of Tao Yuanming but also it is important as a study of manuscript culture. Throughout most of the book, Tian's approach is characterized by the care and circumspection that she gives to each textual variant on Tao Yuanming's life and of his poems. Hers is the most thoroughly researched book on this poet to date. She first analyzes four early biographies written within two centuries of the poet's death. These are the Song History version, the Xiao Tong version, the Jin History version, and the Histories of the Southern Dynasties version. There are both overlapping passages and differences among them. By meticulously comparing the differences, Tian demonstrates that Tao is portrayed differently based on the knowledge of the author and the issues of their time. For instance, Xiao Tong's version is part of a collection of Tao Yuanming's work, with which Xiao is [End Page 271] certainly familiar. Therefore, his version includes anecdotes of Tao's family that cannot be found elsewhere while implicitly reflecting his own readings of Tao's work. The Jin History version removes any mention of Tao Yuanming's refusal to serve the Liu Song. According to Tian, perhaps it is because Tao lived toward the end of the Eastern Jin. In contrast, the Song History promotes the perception of Tao Yuanming as an intense Jin loyalist because the fall of the Northern Song into the hands of the "barbarian" rulers was only too similar to the end of the Jin, and the loyalist sentiments could be easily related to the editors' own times. Despite all these differences, Tian suggests that these biographies are all, to a large extent, based on "Tao Yuanming's own projection of his image in his Master Five Willows" (p. 19). What is fascinating is, as Tian points out, the way in which Chinese scholars have dealt with the biographies: they read them, reconfiguring them according to their own ideological tendency or the norms of contemporary analysis and then use them as...