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Anecdotal Vs. Autobiographical References to Personal History1 Eugene Eoyang University of Indiana, Bloomington

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Anecdotal Vs. Autobiographical References to Personal History1 Eugene Eoyang University of Indiana, Bloomington The Generic Self: Anecdotal vs. Autobiographical References to Personal History1 Eugene Eoyang University of Indiana, Bloomington 244 Douwe Fokkema’s interest in China focused on the modern rather than the tradi- tional period, but he and I shared a profound interest in China of all eras. His interest in political theory and postmodernism made his work essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the modern period, especially in China. As Chargé d’Affaires of the Netherlands diplomatic mission in Beijing, the People’s Republic of China, during the first two years of the Cultural Revolution, he had a unique first-hand exposure to contemporary life in China which few Westerners could match. We met at the meetings of the Executive Committee of the ICLA, and I came to know Douwe as a staunch defender of humanistic studies. In fact, one of my most vivid memories of Douwe was in Athens, Greece, in 1999, when I presented plans for the XVIIth Congress of the ICLA, to take place in Hong Kong in 2003 (a Congress that was postponed to 2004, owing to the SARS scare in the summer of 2003). The initial title proposed for the Congress was: “Toward the Post-Human.” Douwe Fokkema pro- claimed in no uncertain terms that he would not attend a conference with that title; in the end, the topic was changed to “At the Edge: Margins, Frontiers, Initiatives in Literature and Culture.” In the end, Douwe did attend, and, by all accounts, enjoyed the conference. Although Douwe Fokkema concentrated on the modern as opposed to the traditional period in China, I offer this article on classical Chinese poetry as a supplement to his interests. There is a conundrum in the modern reading of classical Chinese poetry. Most of the poems refer to the life of the poet; indeed, many poems are prefaced by colo- phons as to the place and date of composition, and deal with personal feelings. Yet, if one judges autobiographical poetry by its gold standard, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Chinese poems, despite the scholarship that misreads them from a modern point of view, are hardly autobiographical at all. Indeed, it is a convention in the writings Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée CRCL SEPTEMBER 2012 SEPTEMBRE RCLC 0319–051x/12/39.3/244 © Canadian Comparative Literature Association EUGENE EOYANG | THE GENERIC SELF of Chinese literati in traditional periods to strive toward absolute self-abnegation, whether it’s the humility of the Confucian scholar, the non-self of the Buddhist, or the egolessness of the Taoist. Certainly, if classical Chinese poems are autobiographi- cal, they are far from the self-absorbed meditations of many contemporary American poets. How to resolve this quandary, how reconcile the meticulous detail in many traditional Chinese poems with the fact that they are not autobiographical? The answer lies in several factors: first, in the difference between the audience for traditional Chinese poetry and the audience for published poetry, which is not at all the same thing; second, in the differences between the self-image of the Chinese scholar- poet and the self-image of the Romantic or modern poet; and third, in the lexical capabilities in classical Chinese which allows pointedly for the omission of self-reference, even as it describes personal experience. Scholar-poets in traditional China would have been thoroughly familiar with Analects (論語) 9:4, which reads: 子絕四:毋意,毋必,毋固,毋我。 [The Master was entirely free of four things: he had no preconceptions, no arbitrariness, no obstina- 245 cies, no ego]. Whatever one’s own temperament, this would have been the image that each scholar-poet would have tried to convey. Any other persona would have been, at the very least, unworthy.2 The sinological misconception of Chinese poets as being autobiographical started, innocently enough, with the 1929 publication of Florence Ayscough’s The Autobiography of a Chinese Poet and continued with the 1952 publication of William Hung’s Tu Fu: China’s Greatest Poet, in which an able historian assembled an account of Du Fu’s (Tu Fu) life by using his poems as a historical source. This led many schol- ars to assume, almost axiomatically, that the traditional Chinese poets, with Du Fu the greatest among them, wrote autobiographical poetry. Stephen Owen is right to cite “Chinese critics from the Song Dynasty on” referring to “Du Fu as the ‘poet- historian’” but he is less helpful when he claims that “Du Fu was the historian of himself”-a characterization which reflects a self-absorption that would have morti- fied Du Fu, and virtually every other traditional Chinese poet (Owen 413). Du Fu, like many traditional Chinese poets, wrote from personal experience, and from the commonplaces of one’s personal life. But this does not, except to the post-Romantic Westerner weaned on Wordsworth, indicate an autobiographical bent. Du Fu wrote from personal experience, not because he thought his personal experiences were worth recording, but because those experiences situated him anecdotally and chron- ologically in history: they were the basis for being a witness to history. The first individual poet in Chinese, Qu Yuan 屈原, wrote the most seminally per- sonal, if not technically autobiographical poem, since it specified no historical details about himself. His commentators, however, have no doubt that the mythical world he created and the mythical plaint that he composed expressed his actual dissatisfaction with his emperor. His stance in the Li Sao 離騷 became the locus classicus to which every subsequent scholar-poet alluded when he wrote of his disaffections and disap- pointments. If Qu Yuan was unmistakably self-referential, his poem allowed other CRCL SEPTEMBER 2012 SEPTEMBRE RCLC poets to be self-referential by proxy, if not in fact; traditional Chinese poetry could be meticulously personal without being autobiographical. In the process, a generic self developed in the tradition, with a persona of the underappreciated, unfairly vilified, and undeservedly neglected scholar-poet.3 The generic self was the self of the junzi 君 子, the “scholar-gentleman.” Fingarette contrasts the situation of the egoist and the junzi: To look at the ground of an egoist’s will is thus necessarily to look at that ego; whereas to look at the ground of a chun tzu’s [junzi’s] will is to look not at the person but at the tao....the more deeply one explores the chun tzu’s will, the more the personal dimen- sions are revealed as purely formal....To understand the content of the chun tzu’s will is to understand the tao, not the chun tzu as a particular person. The ego is present in the egoist’s will. The tao is present in the chun tzu’s will. (135) Another factor in the absence of individual autobiography among traditional Chinese poets involves a question of audience.4 Modern readers of published works have little 246 or no appreciation that there was no such thing as “publication” in the periods before the advent of print. Poems were written for a known target audience, usually of one’s peers, many of whom one could claim as friends. This audience of literati shared the same perspective, the same code of modesty, the same familiarity with the classics. To relate the details of one’s life to this audience was no more self-important than bringing a friend up-to-date on the happenings in one’s life. The “autobiographical” details were supplied with no portentous ambition of profound significance: there were no “intimations of immortality” on Westminster Bridge, even if ordinary expe- rience, whether in Tao Yuanming or Du Fu or Wang Wei, could offer epiphanies. Furthermore, these poems were, in Stephen Owen’s words, “occasional”, written to commemorate certain occasions and “used in a particular social exchange”; “a poem was often as much a social act,” Owen remarks, “as a literary work of art, and the capacity to compose verse with reasonable grace in a wide variety of social situations was an important accomplishment for an educated person” (371). But the poems were “occasional” in another sense. The poets regarded them as incidental and mun- dane; they set out to impress a select coterie, not a general public: as Owen says, they “always recall the everyday world from which they came.” Yet it would be misleading to assert that all the personal details are “authentic” and without mimetic fictional- ity. The coterie audience guaranteed a certain in-group irony and wit, and one could be sure that one did not have to alert like-minded scholar-poets to the litotes or the hyperboles in one’s rhetoric. To assert, as some have, that “The traditional Chinese reader had faith that poems were authentic presentations of historical experience” underestimates the sophistication of the literati reader, and misleads the modern reader of Chinese poetry into thinking that the traditional Chinese poet was inca- pable of ironic subtlety.5 Finally, the lexical omission of the subject in traditional Chinese poetry accounts for not only the implied self, but-as in several poems by Wang Wei-the absence of self. In some instances, it may imply not merely the subjective “I”, but rather the EUGENE EOYANG | THE GENERIC SELF subjective “we”, conjured up easily enough by correspondents who are like-minded and literate, as in Du Fu’s exchange with Li Bai. And when the traditional Chinese poem embodies and expresses the loneliness of the poet, it does so obliquely, with a surrogate “I”, and the trope evokes not only the experience of the poet-sender of the poem, but, presumably, also the experience of its reader-receiver.
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