Chinese Literature Podcast IV

 Ouyang Xiu

 

About antiquarianism in the Song dynasty. Apparently there’s a mythic contention that Chinese characters derive from the impressions left by birds on the ground.

Li Qingzhao

 

The major female poet of the Song. Some very good, Daoist-inflected stuff here about her reflections on her husband and their changing relationship.

A Male Mencius’ Mother

 

An odd queer/trans story that was probably intended to titillate the original readership, and/or do some ‘or did I just blow your mind?’ shit re: the idea that this Ideal Wife could be a man.

Su Dongpo, Part 2

 

Su Dongpo, the weird conservative these podcast bros have a crush on because he’s good at poems (one can like his poetry and find his politics uninspiring, you truly do not have to hand it to him), expresses disingenuous Gotcha concern for the elderly regarding the salt monopoly. Because of this poem he gets exiled for fucking with then-empowered Wang Anshi, who was executing reforms regarding the lucrative Song salt monopoly. 

 

Stunning how tin-eared these podcast guys are re a political gesture that’s absolutely resonant with the discursive turns of a twitter argument. Like I’m not saying Su Dongpo didn’t believe himself to be authentically interested in The Good State, but the shape of this contention is immediately recognisable as point-scoring ‘but what of the squeezed middle?’ bullshit. This isn’t even projection, it’s just—there’s a thing in scholarship where commenters pretend they, people in the past or both are very Naive, and that’s ludicrous and unnecessary.

 

Wang Anshi – Part 2

 

“The pleasures of an ordinary life, 

I am bitter we will not be able to spend it all together. 

My true wish was that we would grow old, 

relying on each other.”

 

These two wanna talk a lot of shit about how Wang Anshi’s simplistic, Buddhist-inflected poetry isn’t a match for Su Dongpo’s. While I can see an argument that in the Song, poetry and statecraft are commingled in a deep-structure way and can’t be neatly bifurcated by genre of thought and impact in the world as we might today, it’s hardly a new question, is it? Disraeli was more fun than Gladstone, he still sucked ass and was a big racist whose neo-Feudal imaginary, even if we could consider it well-intentioned, stood in blistering defiance of the observable social and economic conditions of the people he was nominally serving. They kind of wanna play it like Su Dongpo’s poetic success, if it exists, is de facto a political triumph, and I find that naive.

 

Further they aren’t really giving much air to the contention that Su Dongpo’s insistent referentiality, which requires people have a lot of expensive training to appreciate it, is itself politicised, classed. For all I myself am a bit nerd who loves referentiality, in such a highly allusive literary tradition, you don’t have to agree for Mao’s later call to walk away from these dependencies or strategies in art to see his point. Wang Anshi’s less allusive craft kind of can’t fail to operate on a politicised register: it is more inclusive. That’s probably deliberate. So like, how does the judgement of these grad students (which prestiges complexity) fit in these schemas of class and education?