The pervasive influence of the Shijing (Book of Poems) and its exegetical traditions on later writers and critics of poetry (and other genres) is universally recognized, if imperfectly understood. In Critics and Commentators, Bruce Rusk explores the relations between the study and exegesis of the Shijing and the writing and criticism of noncanonical poetry, and shows that this influence in fact worked both ways: crucial dimensions of Shijing interpretation, particularly from the eleventh century onward, drew on insights derived from what Rusk terms “secular” poetry.
Two opening chapters lay foundations for the case studies to follow. The first examines the early history through which the term shi took on its doubled reference to entities that were “always related and never identical” (p. 3): initially a term for song lyrics, it became, with increasing specificity from the Han onward, a proper designation (Shi) of the particular collection of 305 poems in the Shijing. Meanwhile, as a general noun (shi), it came to encompass a wide range of latter-day lyric composition, from personal and occasional verse all the way to self-conscious imitations or reenactments of primordial functions of the Shijing itself. A second chapter surveys Southern Song and later attempts to apply some version of this complex range of definitions in assembling collections of “early shi,” including anything from texts ostensibly lost from an original Shijing to a grab-bag of early rhymed texts including divinatory verses and folk aphorisms. The legend of Confucius's redaction of an earlier repertoire of three thousand to arrive at the three-hundred-odd poems of the Shijing had long been central to its canonicity; thus, whether such latter-day “early shi” collections applied moral or purely formal criteria of selection, such projects inevitably had implications for conceptions of the classic's status and significance.
The third chapter centers on a group of eleventh-century poems composed in the manner of the classic, some for actual use in court ritual and others with a view toward more virtual fulfillment for the Song of functions that poems in the Shijing had once performed for the Zhou. Rusk gives a vivid account of the political stakes of these textual and ritual reenactments, which unfolded amid tensions surrounding Renzong's (r. 1022–63) assumption of full imperial powers in 1032–33.
The Shi ji zhuan (Collected Commentaries on the Poems), the definitive version of Zhu Xi's (1130–1200) Shijing commentary, was to exert decisive influence over subsequent scholarship. One of its most distinctive innovations was the practice of labeling each stanza with one of the three tropes (fu, bi, or xing) listed in the most influential early statement of the Shi's general significance, the “Great Preface.” This innovation and its subsequent refinements during the Ming are a central focus of the concluding two chapters. The fourth chapter presents a thought-provoking argument that Zhu Xi's application of the tropes to the Shijing drew on his earlier engagement with the non-canonical Chu ci (Songs of Chu). The final chapter presents a richly documented account of an intertwined group of Ming forgeries ostensibly representing a lost tradition of the Shijing from Confucius's home state of Lu. Rusk provides a vivid picture of the cultural, social, and scholarly environment that engendered this flurry of spurious texts, showing how these Ming scholars, while very much under Zhu Xi's shadow, sought to carve out rival spaces of interpretive authority of their own.
Critics and Commentators tackles an important but thorny set of problems with aplomb. Rusk shows patience and skill in recreating these episodes in the intertwined history of Shi and shi, always attentive to the textual and reception histories of the sources. Occasionally one could wish for a clearer sense of larger contexts. It is intriguing, for example, that Ouyang Xiu (1007–72), in explaining the osprey image from the “Guan ju” in his Shi ben yi (Fundamental Significance of the Poems), tacitly echoes the earlier analysis by Liu Xie (ca. 465–ca. 522) in Liu's literary treatise Wenxin diaolong (Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons) (pp. 125–26), but one misses a larger sense of Ouyang's blurring (albeit cautious) of the boundaries between canonical and latter-day poetry, as by his invocation of ostensibly permanent categories of “human experience” (ren qing) and “expressive pattern” (wen li) in resolving interpretive problems in the Shi. The discussion of Ming-era innovations in the application of the three traditional tropes is full of suggestive detail, but other developments more manifestly engaged with the relation between the Shijing and “secular” poetry remain relatively underexamined. Ming adaptations of the style and format of pingdian (“evaluation and highlighting”) literary commentary to the Shijing would seem highly relevant to the issues addressed here, but the phenomenon receives only cursory treatment. It would also be interesting to incorporate a broader sampling of the explicit theoretical reflection within Chinese tradition on the relation between canonical and latter-day poetry. Wang Fuzhi (1619–92) in his Shi yi (Transferences of Shi/shi) for example states emphatically that only those able to intuit the underlying expressive and functional unity of the Shijing and latter-day poetry are fully qualified to read either Shi or shi. To note such further connections, though, should not detract from the value of what this book accomplishes. Critics and Commentators is a wide-ranging work, adopting a boldly innovative perspective, that illuminates the workings of the “creative conservatism” (p. 98) whereby successive generations both affirmed the self-sameness and antiquity of the Shijing, and also perpetually made it new by discovering its latent connectedness to an ongoing world of poetic creation.
