This year our seminar investigates the role and meaning of language and its forms of expression—poetic foremost—in the sinographic sphere, where the Literary Sinitic Buddhist canon was used and shaped. In this first session, Paula Varsano's paper explores Du Fu's (712–770) innovative poems on painting and their perspective on the poet's mortal subjectivity. Yiren Zheng's paper examines Dong Yue's (1620–1686) theorization of the relationship between dreaming, virtuality, and literary composition. Laurie Patton's and Heather Blair's responses will bring our presenters' work into broader conversations on language and poiesis that this seminar has fostered, including last year’s discussion of poetics in early and medieval South Asia.
What happens when a poet, intent on inscribing his own subjective response to the things of this world, turns his attention to objects that are, themselves, the inscriptions of the responses of others? And, to push the question further, what happens when those objects of his attention are paintings, which strive not to transmit subjective experience, but to transcend it? Until Du Fu (712-770) started writing “poems on painting” (tihua shi), the answer would have been “nothing special.” But in Du Fu’s poetry, painting—or, at least, some paintings—were transformed from marvels of technical prowess into material traces of the human striving for transcendence; and poetry, from a vehicle for the expression of subjective experience into a meditation on mortal subjectivity itself. This paper will explore, not just how such moments of poiesis occurred in specific poems, but also the literary and philosophical conditions that made them possible.
I examine several poems written in the style of regulated poetry and one fu (rhapsody) composed by the seventeenth-century Chinese poet Dong Yue (1620–1686), including “On Dream Journey, Written for the Traveler Roaming around Five Lakes,” “Supplementing the Lines from a Dream,” and “Documenting a Dream from the Seventh Month.” These poems resulted from his active collaboration with his dreams (certain couplets in these poems were even produced within dreams). I attend to an analogy that Dong consistently drew: the process of literary writing is like that of dreaming. I suggest that this observation reflects the poet’s sensitivity towards the way in which literary creation enables virtuality. By choosing the theme of virtuality, I offer an interpretation of poetry’s ability to conjure up lifelike visions and imaginary experiences and to make them tangible, sharable, and in turn, real—a key aspect of poiesis as a transformative mechanism specific to literary writing.