Alongside The Metamorphosis of the Private Sphere by Xiaoshan Yang (2003) and The Problem of Beauty by Ronald Egan (2006), Professor Stephen Owen's new monograph turns out to be another must-read on the studies of literati culture in eleventh-century China. More importantly, this book brings to the fore the significance of Northern Song (960–1126) essayistic prose, a genre often approached as “raw material” by historians and not fully analysed by literary scholars. It provides an exemplary model of reading and grouping classical Chinese essays.
This book centres on the relationship between happiness and possession of “cultural capital” – be that artistic objects, private gardens, or the name/fame of a celebrated writer or artist – raised by Song literary humanists in their essay writing. Another potential interlocutor engaged in this self-conscious discourse of happiness at that time was the group of moral philosophers or Daoxue Confucians who argued for happiness by self-cultivation and “possessing the Way” in place of literary or cultural learning. Alongside this tension, I find three key issues concerning Song literati culture in the book: the intersection of public and private spheres, the emerging commercial world, and essay writing as a means of naming and self-representation.
Chapters 1 and 2, taken together, clearly exemplify how ownership and happiness came into play in public and private realms. Through a close reading of two sets of Ouyang Xiu's 歐陽脩 (1007–1072) prose – a pseudo-autobiography called “The Biography of the Retired Layman Six Ones”, and a series of famous prose written as a local governor of Chuzhou – Owen envisions the dynamics between solitary and shared happiness. The Chuzhou pieces claim that the governor's happiness lies in the happiness of the local populace, whereas the pseudo-autobiography argues for contentment through enjoying one's private properties and art collections. The shifting modes of happiness correspond with the different identities of Ouyang Xiu from a state official to a retired layman. Chapter 4 shows how two other Northern Song scholar-officials, Sima Guang 司馬光 (1019–1086) and Su Shunqin 蘇舜欽 (1008–1048), found peace and leisure in their private gardens, one in retirement, while the other was demoted to the commoner status. These accounts touch on the gradual transformation of the literati mindset to find the meaning of life outside state service, as the latter came to be another “entrapment” (p. 104) and “merely a desire for name/fame” (p. 119). Likewise, chapter 3 raises the interesting question of transfers between private and state-owned possession. By introducing the key term “one with greater strength” 有力, Owen explains that “property depends on power – political, social, or moral – but not on an established sense of rights” (p. 61). In other words, ownership was as transient and unstable as the upholding of power, so that we see private collectors like Ouyang Xiu being aware of the vicissitudes of the gathering and scattering of his rubbings. We also see “rocks of Ling Creek” taken from desolated nature and commoners’ houses and displayed as monumental “public trust”.
Owen's book reminds readers that Northern Song literati culture burgeoned in a commercial society. Books, stones, rubbings, calligraphy, paintings, gardens, and buildings in landscape are sources of happiness belonging to the literati, and they can all be bought, sold, and evaluated in cash. This world of money looms larger in the latter part of the book. We learn about economic activities in Sima Guang's Solitary Happiness Garden recorded in contemporary miscellanies (chapter 4); Huang Tingjian's 黃庭堅 (1045–1105) “Account of Pine and Chrysanthemum Pavilion” illustrates the merchant class engaging in cultural enterprise and the incipient formation of local gentry (chapter 5); both Huang's essay and Wen Tong's 文同 (1018–1079) ink-bamboo painting (chapter 6) demonstrate how aesthetic value attached to “name” and signature could be exchanged for cash value. These discussions are thought-provoking and show the potential of associating Song literary studies with intellectual and social history.
The power of naming is also highlighted in this book. Essay writing, according to Owen, is a story- and meaning-making process, a privileged capacity of literati. Ouyang Xiu, as the Chuzhou governor, stood at the top of “a hierarchy of knowledge and thus a hierarchy of happiness” (p. 46), since he could “give names and history to the local populace” (p. 66) and acquired “a remarkably self-consciousness happiness” that commoners lacked (p. 53). In parallel, Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101), in his “Account of Stone Bell Mountain”, discovered the truth of the name for himself, despite there being the local wisdom of illiterate fishermen and boatmen (chapter 5). Fundamentally speaking, objects and landscapes can only be remembered to posterity through this naming and story/meaning-making mechanism, like the cases of rocks at Ling Creek and the Stone Bell Mountain; conversely, it is eventually names and figurative signatures that outlive the physical rocks, pavilions, and gardens.
Finally, for literary scholars, this monograph provides inspiring ways to study classical essays. It is a pleasure to read Professor Owen's brilliant readings supplemented by precise and elegant translations of major pieces. His interpretation sheds new light on the most familiar prose by finding “holes” or “gaps” that “interrupt” the linear text (p. 115), especially in Su Shi's pieces where, apart from the ultimate truth, there is always more to be said. Owen also introduces the notion of a “family” of texts (pp. 56–7), which emphasizes the social life of contemporary texts shared and circulated within the literati community, who dwelled on the same “living questions” and produced essayistic prose to join the discussion – the rhetorical procatalepsis (p. 28) is a case in point. Yet I wonder, since most of the prose analysed here consists of Northern Song masterpieces (especially those by Ouyang Xiu and Su Shi), how literary scholars should select and deal with lesser-known prose? Another potential advance for this topic could be interdisciplinary reference to art-historical studies, which is determined by the very nature of texts on literati culture.
