Ten Thousand Scrolls

CHAPTER FIVE Ten Thousand Scrolls Our discussions in the foregoing chapters have enabled us finally to con- sider the basic questions that informed and motivated this study. What did dushu mean for Huang Tingjian? What was the purpose of reading for him? Why did a previously unproblematic process become problem- atic during this period? More specifically, how did the explosion of texts brought about by printing affect the practice and conceptualization of reading and writing? The strong correlation found in Huang Tingjian’s poetics between book study and literary composition begs us to examine the interface between the intellectual and the material in broader contexts. The current chapter represents my attempt to define those contexts beyond the special critical and interpretive needs of Huang Tingjian’s poetics as well as the particular contingencies of the intellectual culture of the eleventh century, and examine more deeply the sources of the intense ma- teriality in his works. I begin by delineating the general conditions of reading and writing in the early Northern Song, taking the vicissitudes of the Tang writer Han Yu’s works in the first century after the founding of the Northern Song as an example. From that I proceed to discuss how the radical surge in the availability of printed texts in the second half of the eleventh century disrupted and irrevocably changed some of the most re- vered assumptions about reading and writing among the literati. In the last section, I reconnect back to the topic of wanjuan discussed in Chap- ter 4 by performing a close analysis of Su Shi’s famous account of a book collection at Mount Lu left by his friend Li Chang, reading it side by side with similar accounts from both Su’s contemporaries and his successors in Ten Thousand Scrolls 163 the Southern Song and beyond. I argue that the level of straightforward and self-conscious reflection demonstrated in Su Shi’s essay provides us with not only a valuable frame of comparison for Huang Tingjian’s more careful and nuanced treatment of the topic, but also a lens through which the author’s inner reaction to the epochal encounter between technology and the intellectual production of knowledge can be viewed in more fruit- ful ways. “Was There Such Writing in the Tang?” In Chapter 1 we saw how the Tang poet Du Fu was established in the literary critical discourse of the eleventh century as the ultimate model for poetry, a process that, as I argued, was integral to the emergence and de- velopment of the poetics of Huang Tingjian and of the Jiangxi School. The canonization of Du Fu well illustrates the intellectual and cultural processes by which the intrinsic features of a writer’s work were made to match the manifest desire of the culture for grand models and historical guidance. It can be argued that it was the grandeur- and model-thirsty intellectual culture of the eleventh century that created the fascination with Du Fu in the first place; in other words, Du Fu was not only discov- ered by that culture but also made by it. This is the side of the Du Fu story we are more or less familiar with. There is, however, another, and less often told, side of it: Du Fu’s canonization, as I mentioned briefly in Chapter 1, also depended upon the strenuous efforts of scholars in the first half of the eleventh century to gather, collate, and edit his works, culminating in the printing of a “complete” collection in 1059.1 These cumulative editorial efforts played an in- dispensable role in the ensuing focused study and ultimate consecration of Du Fu’s poetry during the second half of the century by providing a necessary textual basis for the intellectual and literary inquiry. What made these eleventh-century efforts really stand out and become a permanent legacy in Du Fu scholarship, however, is the fact that the result of that col- lective endeavor, i.e., a “complete” collection of Du Fu’s poetry, was put for the first time to printing. This fact is often skipped over in our current discussion of the phenomenon, and it may seem only a trivial detail in the lengthy intellectual and literary process toward Du Fu’s canonization over the eleventh century. However, without the perpetuating power provided by the printing blocks, which permanently secured the result of those .

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