EAST ASIAN PUBLISHING AND SOCIETY East Asian Publishing and Society 2 (2012) 309-313 brill.com/eaps

Book Reviews

Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China. Christopher M. B. Nugent. Cambridge, Harvard University Asia Center, 2010. ISBN 9780674056039. $39.95.

Christopher Nugent’s study is nothing less than a social history of poetry in Tang China. This is not clear at the beginning: the work begins largely as a polemic challenging the habit readers have of assuming that the transmission of medieval texts is reliable. As he suggests, Golden Age verse is very much a construct based on circulation, publication, and canoniza- tion procedures that took place mostly during the Song Dynasty: “what we think of as ‘Tang poetry’ is a very different beast from ‘poetry during the Tang’ ” (p. 4). In contrast, if we compare the Chinese case to that of medieval Europe (and use many of the insights of recent Western textual scholars), we are left with the unnerving conclusion that our seem- ingly stable texts have been altered considerably in the hands of copyists who made simple errors or, in many cases, had no qualms about changing the text as they saw fit in the name of “improvement.” This insight, the author points out, may have serious repercussions for Chinese literary interpretation, since the act of reading has long been seen as the recon- struction of the “writing self”, rooted in the claim that a good reader can come to know the poet intimately through his perfect inscription in the poem. However, this important point is merely a framing argument for Nugent’s work and is only addressed intermittantly through the work. Ultimately, he is most successful in the more ambitious task of re-creating the rich world of textual transmission and exchange in the Tang Dynasty; here, his narrative depends on a sensitive and thoughtful reading of the anecdotal evidence. Nugent’s first chapter, “Textual Variation in Poetic Manuscripts from Dunhuang,” attempts a statistical analysis of surviving poems from the Dunhuang corpus to prove that a wide degree of variation occurs in manuscript texts. More specifically, he examines the one poem that survives in more than two copies (Wei Zhuang’s 韋莊 (836-910) “Lament of the Lady of Qin,” Qinfu yin 秦婦吟, a long narrative ballad of 238 lines) in order to demonstrate the impossibility of establishing an urtext for the poem and to suggest the independence of the various scribes that copied it. Though his largely technical discussion here is quite useful for the reconstruction of typical scribal errors and variations (and pro- vides us with a useful reminder of what it means to copy texts in a manuscript culture), there are a number of issues here that cannot help but make his efforts problematic. As Nugent himself admits, it is dangerous to see Dunhuang as representative of Tang cultural production: “Communication did allow a large inflow of Tang cultural products and influ- ences, but it did not turn Dunhuang into a Chang’an on the frontier” (p. 30). The largely unsatisfactory corpus of surviving poems from the caves demonstrates this: anyone who hopes to get a sense of how works by the major Tang poets circulated in the China of the time will be disappointed. Few poems exist in more than one copy, and surviving texts seem

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/22106286-12341238 310 Book Reviews / East Asian Publishing and Society 2 (2012) 309-313 skewed toward certain genres and poets—in particular, works that might be seen as more “popular” in nature. The use of “Qinfu yin” then as a primary test-case becomes doubly problematic. Nugent suggests that its extraordinary length alone makes it exceptional, and that its relatively late date (c. 886) may tell us little about Tang traditions of copying in general. And yet, he says, this should not prevent us from seeing the advantages of using this particular poem: “While these objections are valid, they are legitimately outweighed by the primary advantage of ‘Qinfu yin’ as an object for this type of textual study, namely the exceptionally large num- ber of copies of it available in manuscript form” (p. 31). However, one might argue that this factor is not a plus, but yet another minus: not only does its very length makes it an extra- ordinary anomaly, but its survival in large numbers suggests that it was a particularly popu- lar narrative poem that may have appealed to an audience quite different from the one that would have circulated and appreciated the vast bulk of Tang poetry as we now know it. Moreover, its function as a long narrative poem (rather than as a short lyric) suggests that textual accuracy would have been considerably less important to its readership: audiences would most likely have been attracted to its narrative sweep rather than to its use of imagery in this or that line. In the end, it would be quite easy to argue that “Qinfu yin” would inevitably produce a wide statistical variation in its different manuscripts, and that this variation really can tell us very little about variation in Tang poetry in general. Nugent does attempt to look at surviving copies of a number of Gao Shi’s 高適 (d. 765), works, but the quantity of poems and of copies are not really sufficient to draw significant conclusions (not to mention the issue of why Gao Shi plays the enigmatic role of most popular poet in the Dunhuang manuscripts). Nugent’s discussion here brings up another point worth considering: granting a statisti- cal analysis that tells us of the huge variation in the “Qinfu yin” manuscripts, what does this mean for the actual reading experience? In summarizing his conclusions, he states:

What is clear is that someone reading the poem found in manuscripts S5477 or P3910 would have a very different experience from someone reading that written out by the copyist of P3780. They will encounter numerous lines that differ not only in the form of the words but in their meaning as well. Given the tendency in traditional Chinese literary criticism to focus very closely on single words and compounds as examples of literary achievement, these differences might well add up to different judgments on the merit of the poem. (p. 64)

True enough, perhaps; but what constitutes that reading “experience”? Some concrete sug- gestions about how the poem might read differently in different manuscripts might be useful. Does one version create a greater sympathy for the protagonist than the other? How are our perspectives or emotions engaged differently from text to text? Is there any indica- tion that different copyists may have had different prejudices in the changes they make? And would a reader of “Qinfu yin” specifically (as I suggested above) really care about single words and compounds? It is too much to ask the author to speculate—even with the rela- tively large number of manuscripts, we really don’t have enough evidence to make informed guesses. Yet without a further movement towards interpretation, statistical analysis has