David Schneider's Confucian Prophet is an engaging piece of scholarship. It raises thought-provoking questions while demonstrating solid command of relevant texts. By focusing on the five years surrounding the outbreak of An Lushan's rebellion in 755 and on a limited number of poems composed by Du Fu during that period, Schneider describes how Du Fu perceived the fury the rebellion unleashed. He argues that Du was exceptional in that he drew on the “most profound and powerful elements of Chinese civilization” and used poetry to “deliver the most trenchant and powerful critiques of the political culture of his day” (p. 217).
This is not a “literary biography.” There is little on Du Fu's career or personal relationships beyond what affects the interpretation of the chosen poems. Instead, the book forces one to ponder the role of the poet during a political crisis. Schneider takes his reader through the material in five chapters that successively cover the relationship of poetry to politics, kingship ideals, Du's poetic identification with popular suffering, his view of the relationship between civilization and barbarism, and his status as a “Confucian prophet.”
The focus results in one of the book's strengths. Throughout his chapters, Schneider layers readings to demonstrate how Du Fu drew on multiple currents within the Chinese literary tradition to craft complex poetic works that are deceptively accessible but profoundly challenging. Welcome here is Schneider's attempt to introduce analytical concepts to situate Du Fu, not only within the Chinese poetic tradition, but also within wider literary typologies. The two key typologies are those of the prophet and the utopian.
Schneider will spark debate on these meaty issues. Labeling Du Fu's art is necessarily fraught. Students of Chinese poetry are familiar with the history of identifying Du Fu as a Confucian poet (in contrast to Li Bai's supposed libertine tendencies). Schneider has courageously accepted the challenge of substantiating Du's Confucian credentials by reading these poems in the light of politics and textual history.
Schneider's discussion of the utopian typology is largely successful. It is well grounded in both Western and Sinological treatments of the subject. Schneider reveals how Du's approach synthesizes two visions of utopia—the political and the Arcadian—in a manner that distinguishes Du from Tao Qian even while Du drew significant poetic inspiration from Tao.
The classification of Du as a prophet is more problematic. Since Schneider does not offer a systematic definition of the term, it is hard to tell whether he uses it simply as a commonplace for a doomsayer or whether he is wading into a debate about the nature of Chinese civilization. The discussion of prophecy relies on the application of the term to Confucianism by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Julia Ching. Schneider seems to view Du as a Confucian prophet because Du was willing to criticize the powerful for misrule while alluding to a vision of good governance rooted in a Mencian political economy. Unfortunately, there is not quite enough here to determine how exceptional Du was in this and therefore whether “prophet” is the appropriate Western analogue.
The identification of Du Fu as a prophet, moreover, is not readily compatible with the assertion that he took up philosophical positions within the Confucian tradition. If prophecy means more than a critique of the powerful for contemporary disorder—if Du was accessing a truth not broadly available to others—then Du Fu the prophet was not a philosopher. By contrast, because the Confucian Classics were available to all educated men who presumed that the natural world manifested an inherent order, the idea that Du was a philosopher might be easier to sustain than the contention that he had the privileged access of a prophet.
Yet, casting Du as a philosopher also requires reflection. Schneider notes in chapter 5 that Du's accomplishment was not theoretical analysis; it was brilliantly constructing poetic images of political ideas. His few surviving prose writings do not contain philosophical treatises, and his poetic art seems removed from discursive philosophy.
Finally, the positioning of Du in his sociopolitical context warrants comment. Many date the beginning of the Tang-Song transition to the outbreak of the An Lushan rebellion and see the disappearance of the “great clans” as central to that transition. Taking up the idea of a tension between the clans and a new emergent class of literati, Schneider argues that Du Fu represented “the literati as a whole” (p. 24) in contrast to the aristocratic clans dominant at court. I applaud Schneider for reengaging the debate over Tang social history for English readers, but this will clearly be just a first salvo. Without a biographical section, Schneider cannot substantiate his identification of Du Fu with a literati “class,” much less demonstrate that this class existed and was recognized in the 750s. The next step is to engage the existing scholarship on Middle-Period class structure to situate Du Fu in a particular class formation.
That, however, is not required to establish that Du was troubled by a political system that allowed powerful families to live luxuriously at court while the people suffered amid deteriorating conditions in the mid-750s, and that he produced powerful art to register his objections. Schneider has accomplished this and much more by reviving the question of how exactly Du Fu's artistry relates to the grand political and social issues of his day.
