The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China: The “Fragrant and Bedazzling” Movement (1600–1930)

Abstract

Li Xiaorong's newest book, The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China, in many ways complements and enriches the literary and gender dimensions engaged in her equally luminous 2012 monograph, Women's Poetry of Late Imperial China: Transforming the Inner Chambers. In her earlier work, Li focused on the trope of guige 閨閣 (inner chambers) as the pivot of her analysis of Ming-Qing women's poetry, probing its gendered implications as a physical, social, and literary space. The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China, on the other hand, deals with literati poetry and other literary sources produced between the late Ming and the early Republican era and thus transports its readers to the wai 外 (literary), outer, male-gendered realm, an equally genred sphere in which male poets and authors relied on xiangyan 香艷 (fragrant and bedazzling) as a cornerstone for their aesthetic and political movements. As is the case for Women's Poetry of Late Imperial China, there is much to learn from Poetics and Politics of Sensuality, a groundbreaking, impressively researched, and highly original work that complicates and completes the knowledge that students and scholars of Chinese studies need to gain about literature, culture, poetry, and intellectual history in the early and the modern periods.Li explicitly states that her study's main objective is not to provide a “genealogy of literature related to the concept of xiangyan” (2)—though she does provide her audience with a brief but illuminating timeline of the concept before the late Ming era. Rather, she strives to isolate “the poetics and politics of sensuality from the prevalent Confucian exegetical tradition,” in order to produce the “first history of how ‘fragrant and bedazzling’ became a guiding aesthetic of countercultural movements from the late Ming to the early Republican era” (10). Thus, theoretically, this book purports to present a revisionist genealogy of a specific set of sources that have been either misread or forgotten, by engaging both the erotic and the political import of these writers’ output during roughly three hundred years. In so doing, Li succeeds first of all in bringing “sexy” back, as it were, to the works of the literati, whose xiangyan metaphors have been too often (mis)understood as conventional and trite expressions of loyalism and patriotism. Second, and just as significant, Poetics and Politics of Sensuality reconstructs how sensualist poets and other writers of these eras, in embracing and praising desire and love, were operating as cultural and political dissidents who first rejected orthodox neo-Confucianism and eventually also the radical cultural reform agenda of the late Qing and the New Culture movement of the republic. Her historiographical efforts rest on a dazzling array of archival resources, many of which are discussed for the first time, that include an impressive array of primary sources, from late Ming and Qing anthologies of sensual poetry and essays to modern magazines and newspapers. The author's extensive quotations from these little-known texts, along with her superb translations, will prove enlightening and useful to many and will go a long way toward supporting and strengthening the rationale for studying Li's perspective on this material.Temporality plays a central place in Li's revisionist agenda, and she accordingly has organized Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in two chronological parts that in her view mark the emergence and the return of xiangyan as a countercultural force. The first part focuses on the Ming, and the second on heterogeneous materials composed at of the turn of the twentieth century, with a short but incisive and thought-provoking coda on the legacy of xiangyan on May Fourth Period's authors. Li's chronological teleology may not initially strike late imperial studies specialists as necessarily innovative, as it works within conventional historical frameworks. It is important to underline, however, how her choice of privileging poetry in general, and shi 詩 poetry in particular, as the main focus for her exploration of xiangyan in the late Ming period and beyond is at once innovative and illuminating. Many scholars to date have written about the late imperial cult of qing 情 (emotions) almost exclusively in the context of late imperial fiction and drama, so much so that classic poetry is never mentioned as a meaningful site for engagement with desires of the heart, let alone of the flesh, articulated in this period. One of Li's great contributions to this line of research is thus to prove, beyond any doubt, how scholars interested in understanding representations of and engagement with feelings, as a literary, cultural, and political site of meaning production, need to include not just the poetic medium in general but specifically the highest and most classic genre of poetic parlance, the shi. A second arena where Li's chronological approach succeeds in breaking new ground is in framing the conscious adoption of xiangyan not in spite of but precisely as a result of its intersection with marginality and femininity as a vehicle for resistance and empowerment on the part of male authors, especially vis-à-vis the challenges posited by the civil service examination system. Lastly, Li powerfully and convincingly introduces her readers to the rediscovery of xiangyan in the late Qing period, after a stasis of almost two hundred years, which the author attributes to “a strong tendency to purify or de-eroticize literature” and to the efforts of scholars like Shen Deqian 沈德潜 (1673–1769) to “restore a Confucian teaching of poetics” (18) in the High Qing period. In so doing, Li maps the ways in which xiangyan was recovered and redeployed in new ways by male authors in their efforts to come to terms with literary, social, and political manifestations of modernity, caught as they were between the end of the Qing dynasty and the rise of the republic.I cannot deny that at times, as a scholar of gender and sexuality studies, I would have liked the author to ask even more complex questions in terms of the dynamics of appropriation, ventriloquization, and performance of the feminine by the male authors she discusses. In this sense, for instance, relying only on Toril Moi's dated re-presentation of Julia Kristeva's definition of femininity, especially given the latter's problematic engagement with Chinese womanhood and, more important, given the current lively landscapes of femininity and masculinity studies within and outside Chinese studies, may seem a missed opportunity to truly open late imperial Chinese poetry studies to realize the potential that a more consistent engagement with gender not just as a theme but also as a discipline could bring to the field. One could also wonder how powerful xiangyan as a countercultural force truly was if Shen Deqian and others could relatively smoothly and quickly stifle its exuberance and its appeal to men of letters for more than two hundred years. More pointedly, while of course Li's focus is shi poetry, it would have been interesting to see her engage a bit more with the legacy of the late Ming poetic material she so deftly analyzes in the first part of her book on the High Qing period fiction and drama, where many of the erotic and transgressive countercultural impulses Li describes in the first part of her book seem to have migrated. But these, as well as other questions that may arise for the many readers this book deserves, emerge precisely because of the depth and breadth of the author's vision and are ultimately a testament to the quality of her scholarship.In conclusion, this work makes many important contributions in many different arenas, ranging from Ming and Qing Chinese literary and intellectual history to the history of the cult of qing across time. It also underscores the need to understand the multilayered impacts and legacies of these early modern literary practices on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as vehicles for literary modernization that bridge and connect in a fluid, albeit uneven, fashion “premodern” and “modern” poetic utterances, genres, and sources. For all of these reasons and many more that readers will discover on their own terms and pleasures, The Poetics and Politics of Sensuality in China is a must-read for scholars and students within and outside Chinese studies, and one that deserves to be understood and celebrated across disciplinary and area-studies boundaries.