Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture: The Record of a Dusty Table (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture: The Record of a Dusty Table Robert Ashmore Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture: The Record of a Dusty Table by Xiaofei Tian. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. Pp. x + 319. $60.00. If "classic" texts are those that succeed in compelling later generations to reproduce them-whether through the recasting, imitation, and response of later creative work, through critical and philological exegesis, or in the more ephemeral spaces of the reader's imagination-then Tao Yuanming's literary collection occupies a unique and central place among the classics of the Chinese tradition. To an almost unparalleled degree, this text has enticed its readers to respond to its author, to enter into conversation with him, and to claim to understand him. For many readers, the claim of a special bond with Tao Yuanming became an essential dimension of their own cultural and literary self-fashioning-Wang Ji (ca. 590-644), who wrote numerous works in direct imitation of Tao and to some extent modeled himself as a hermit on Tao, and Su Shi (1037-1101), who famously wrote poems in response to every poem in Tao's collection, using the same rhyme words (that is, "harmonizing the rhymes"; he yun 和韻), are only two of the most striking examples in this regard.1 However, in [End Page 182] the voluminous and multifaceted scholarly and imaginative literature that has sprung up around Tao's collection, one key dimension of the early reproduction of the text has heretofore escaped sustained and systematic critical reflection: the countless and complexly intertwined acts of transcription, mistranscription, collation, and emendation that formed the material basis for the collection's reception and survival from the time of the author's death up to the advent of the Song and Yuan printed editions from which all modern editions derive. Xiaofei Tian's Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture: The Record of a Dusty Table sets about to redress this oversight, and along the way says much of interest, ranging from deeply original insights into particular works to important general questions and observations about the ideological and material underpinnings of textual and cultural reproduction in traditional China. The book's argument involves two main layers, which complement and shed light on one another, even while seeming at times to pull in opposite directions. First, Tian invites us to take a mental leap, from the familiar world of the relatively stable texts of print culture back into the world of manuscript transmission, where flux and multiformity were the norm-and where the creativity intrinsic to reading and reception involved not simply variations in readers' understanding of literary works, but also alterations to the text itself. Second, Tian attempts to reach back to before the advent of print-a cultural and technological upheaval that, she argues, resulted in a flattening out and impoverishment of the poet's voice-to recover a sense of Tao Yuanming as he might have sounded to his contemporaries. Tian does not make explicit the exact relation between these two layers of argument, and it would be possible to see them as working at cross-purposes, in the sense that the goal of recapturing an "original" Tao seems different in kind from that of imagining a world of manuscript culture in which texts and authors alike were inherently multiform. Yet at the minimum, the often vast distance between the "standard" Tao Yuanming of latter-day school anthologies and the range of "variant" Tao Yuanmings who emerge from Tian's revisionist readings offer us a reminder of the range of possibilities encompassed in the old world of manuscript. [End Page 183] The variant manuscript readings documented in early printed editions of Tao Yuanming provide indirect and fragmentary glimpses of the history of manuscript transmission of the poet's works prior to the rise of print. On close examination, Tian argues, this evidence shows that the range of textual variation encompassed by the manuscript tradition was quite broad-so broad, in fact, that different choices among variant readings could yield qualitatively different kinds of poet. Even as the editors of the earliest (that is, Song and Yuan) printed variorum editions documented the variety of...