Elegies for Empire The Poetics of Memory in the Late Work of Du Fu (712-770) Gregory M. Patterson Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 ! 2013 Gregory M. Patterson All rights reserved ABSTRACT Elegies for Empire: The Poetics of Memory in the Late Work of Du Fu (712-770) Gregory M. Patterson This dissertation explores highly influential constructions of the past at a key turning point in Chinese history by mapping out what I term a poetics of memory in the more than four hundred poems written by Du Fu !" (712-770) during his two-year stay in the remote town of Kuizhou (modern Fengjie County #$%). A survivor of the catastrophic An Lushan rebellion (756-763), which transformed Tang Dynasty (618-906) politics and culture, Du Fu was among the first to write in the twilight of the Chinese medieval period. His most prescient anticipation of mid-Tang concerns was his restless preoccupation with memory and its mediations, which drove his prolific output in Kuizhou. For Du Fu, memory held the promise of salvaging and creatively reimagining personal, social, and cultural identities under conditions of displacement and sweeping social change. The poetics of his late work is characterized by an acute attentiveness to the material supports—monuments, rituals, images, and texts—that enabled and structured connections to the past. The organization of the study attempts to capture the range of Du Fu’s engagement with memory’s frameworks and media. It begins by examining commemorative poems that read Kuizhou’s historical memory in local landmarks, decoding and rhetorically emulating great deeds of classical exemplars. The second chapter explores the shifting boundaries Du Fu draws between the customs of Kuizhou’s local people and the orthodox ritual practices that defined his identity as a scholar-official. This is followed by an interlude that discusses poems on housework, in which domesticating projects spur reflection on poetry’s capacity to create cultural value through commemoration. Chapter three turns to poems on paintings, arguing that for Du Fu painted images served as a vital support for memory of pre-rebellion court society, and that in writing on them he both drew upon and redefined a medieval visual aesthetic of craft and pictorial illusionism. The fourth and final chapter analyzes the rhetoric of narrative autobiographical poems, traditionally approached as non-figurative factual records, in order to elucidate Du Fu’s retrospective construction of a self. A picture thus emerges of a body of work in which memory, mediated through material objects and practices, functioned to envision and rebuild frameworks of identity in an age of upheaval and transition. This study contributes to a more critical understanding of a major poet, of the representation and uses of memory in traditional Chinese poetry, and of the emergence of new forms of expression and literati identity in late medieval China. Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter One: The Potter’s Wheel and the Temple: Placing and Performing Historical Memory in Du Fu’s Late Poetry……………….20 Chapter Two: Shifting Boundaries of Customs and Classics: Locality and Cultural Memory in Du Fu’s Poetics of the Southwest Frontier……..74 Interlude: Private Investments: Housework, Poetry, and the Production of Value………………………………....126 Chapter Three: Memory Images: Craft, Illusion, and Fidelity in Du Fu’s Poems on Paintings……………………....149 Chapter Four: Travels on the Stage of Brush and Ink: Autobiographical Memory in Du Fu’s Late Narrative Poems……………………..205 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………248 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………..255 i Acknowledgements This dissertation could not have been written without the generous support and encouragement of many people. I would first of all like to thank my advisor, Wendy Swartz, who taught me to read medieval Chinese poetry, and who has been a model of generosity and scholarly dedication. I am deeply grateful to Shang Wei for his keen insights and sage advice, and for always setting aside another hour to talk with me about Du Fu. I thank Pauline Yu, who introduced me to the fascinations of Tang poetry as an undergraduate, for many years of guidance and support. Bob Hymes’s incisive comments helped set the project on track in its early stages. Finally, I am indebted to Eva Shan Chou for agreeing to spend a sweltering New York summer reading the entire project, and for her expert criticism. I would also like to acknowledge the generosity of several teachers who, though not members of my committee, gave me their time and thoughtful advice. Lydia Liu welcomed my queries even when they were misguided, and always challenged me to think with greater precision and imagination. David Lurie offered invaluable counsel on a range of matters late in the game, with unfailing good sense and wry humor. I thank the members of the Chinese Medieval Studies Workshop for including me, year after year, in their stimulating and convivial meetings. My friends and colleagues in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures have been constant sources of inspiration and comfort. I can hardly thank them enough for making my years in Morningside Heights such happy ones. Thanks especially to Dan ii Asen, Anatoly Detwyler, Linda Feng, Noga Ganany, Arunabh Ghosh, Gal Gvili, Nan Hartman, Sara Kile, Nate Shockey, Myra Sun, and Zhong Yurou. Many thanks are due to my teachers and friends in Taiwan, both at the International Chinese Language Program and at National Taiwan University. Cheng Yu-yu, my advisor at NTU, deserves my special gratitude for her many helpful comments and suggestions during the research phase of the project. Research for the dissertation was made possible by a Fulbright-Hays fellowship in 2009-10. The Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation provided funding for the completion of the project in 2012-13. I gratefully acknowledge the support of both of these institutions. Last but certainly not least I would like to thank my family. My parents have given me limitless love and encouragement throughout all my unorthodox endeavors. As has my sister, Kate, the kindest of kin. I lovingly thank my wife, Peggy Hung, for everything. iii 1 Introduction On November 15, 767, the poet Du Fu !" (712-770) attended a dance performance in Kuizhou #$ (modern Fengjie County %&'), a remote town at the mouth of the Yangzi River Three Gorges where he had lodged for two years. Overcome by a sense of déjà vu, he inquired about the aged dancer’s past. She told him her name was Miss Li the Twelfth ()*+, and that she had once been a disciple of the great Madame Gongsun ,-.+, a star at the glamorous court of Emperor Xuanzong /0 (r. 712-756). This explained the poet’s dawning recognition, for he had seen Madame Gongsun dance in the capital when he was a boy. Those days, though still fresh in his memory, were now a world away. Xuanzong’s court had been dispersed in early 756 by the devastating rebellion of An Lushan 123 (703-757), which nearly toppled the Tang Dynasty (618- 906). Many courtiers and entertainers fled the war-torn capital region in search of safety and sympathetic patrons. And thus a new figure appeared on the cultural stage: the displaced survivor of the “flourishing times” 45, refugees and exiles like Du Fu and Miss Li who had once performed for princes, but now resembled itinerant peddlers. They were figures of memory, living ruins of a bygone age. There was something irresistibly compelling about these spectral figures, and they proliferated in the literature of the decades following the rebellion. We come upon scores of them in both poetry and prose: anonymous, impoverished, solitary, and yet bearing some mark of grace or distinction that betrays their hidden pasts and provokes our fascination. They have stories to tell. Susan Stewart has written of the souvenir that it “must remain impoverished and partial so that it can be supplemented by a narrative 2 discourse…which articulates the play of desire.”1 The partial and abject object calls out to be filled in and made whole by memory. This describes well the role of the survivor of flourishing times in post-rebellion Tang literature, who “articulated the play of desire” for the world from which they came. Du Fu was among the first to introduce these souvenir figures into cultural consciousness, through poems like “A Ballad on Viewing the Sword Dance of a Disciple of Madame Gongsun” !"#$%&'()*+.2 However, such poems were but one expression of a much more pervasive preoccupation with memory and forms of survival that characterizes his work from Kuizhou in particular, and which is the subject of the present study. Like the river that filled his eyes and ears while he wrote, memory courses through these works, welling up in commemorations of local history, spilling over in descriptions of visual art, and flashing forth in pieces on ordinary, everyday events. As these examples suggest, memory in these poems is not only ubiquitous, but manifests itself in many ways. There is an abundance of personal (or autobiographical) memory, but its social, historical, and cultural forms are just as prevalent. A primary goal of this project is to map out and describe different “frameworks of memory” in Du Fu’s late works, and to explore their functions.3 I will argue that for Du Fu in Kuizhou, memory functioned as a particular kind of world-making, a “poetics” which enabled him to envision frameworks of identity and belonging that had become destabilized in the wake 1 On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 136.