四六談麈

Sìliù tán zhǔ 四六談麈

Whisk of Talks on Four-and-Six Parallel Prose by 謝伋 (撰)

About the work

The Sìliù tán zhǔ 四六談麈, in one juǎn, is the second of the two principal Sòng-period critical treatises on sìliù wén 四六文 (the four-and-six parallel prose of imperial drafting and court correspondence), composed by Xiè Jí 謝伋 (zì Jǐngsī 景思, fl. 1141) — a great-nephew of the Cheng-school philosopher Xiè Liángzuǒ 謝良佐 and son of the Restoration-era statesman Xiè Kèjiā 謝克家. The book is dated by its author’s preface to Shàoxīng 11, fifth month, thirteenth day (1141). It complements Wáng Zhì’s 王銍 Sìliù huà 四六話 KR4i0016 of about a generation earlier and is generally judged the deeper-cutting of the two — Wáng surveyed the genre as a working zhìgào drafter, while Xiè analyzes the formal logic of jiǎncái 翦裁 (cutting and tailoring) and the breakdown of the older balance between meaning and craft. The title’s tánzhǔ 談麈 — “the whisk one waves while conversing” — alludes to the qīngtán 清談 practice of Eastern Jìn salon talk and frames the work as informal connoisseurship. As the Sìkù editors observe, Xiè’s analytical preference for jiǎncái over symmetric repetition was prescient of and corrective for the disease of late Southern-Sòng sìliù.

Tiyao

This book was printed in Zuǒ Guī’s Bǎichuān xuéhǎi 百川學海. The old recension had at the top of the first juǎn only the rubric “Língshíshān yàoliáo”, with no author named. The Shūlù jiětí records it as by Xiè Jí. Examination of the book shows that the author refers to himself by name as Jí — confirming the attribution. Jí’s zì was Jǐngsī; he was a native of Shàngcài. He held office to Tàicháng shàoqīng. He was the son of the vice-minister of state Kèjiā, and a great-nephew of Xiè Liángzuǒ — the Xiāoyáo gōng 逍遙公 he refers to is Liángzuǒ. His remarks on sìliù mostly take the placement of meaning and the choice of diction as the basis for distinguishing skilled from unskilled — penetrating further than Wáng Zhì’s Sìliù huà. He says: sìliù is for zhìgào, biǎozòu, wénxí (edicts, memorials, declarations and writs), originally to facilitate proclamation: hence four- and six-character lines. In the Xuānhé era there was much use of full long sentences forming the pair; the habit grew, and to this day the full change has not been effected — the older masters had no such practice. He also says: the craft of sìliù is in the jiǎncái. If you place a whole sentence against a whole sentence, where would the craft show? — a thrust precisely cutting the disease of Southern-Sòng sìliù. The exemplary lines he picks are mostly shared with other treatises, but the choices are his own and not copied. For example, in the case of Liào Mínglüè 廖明略: Wáng Zhì’s Sìliù huà prints several couplets from his “Congratulations to Ān Hòuqīng” and “Zhāng Chéngxiàng” exordia; Jí omits these and instead takes a single piece from Liào’s “Hanging the Merit-and-Virtue Statement on behalf of Hòuqīng” — showing he was not making other people’s choices.

Fèi Gǔn’s 費袞 Liángxī mànzhì says: “Xiè Jǐngsī’s Sìliù tán zhǔ is most fresh and remarkable; yet in his entry on Chén Qùfēi 陳去非 [Chén Yǔyì] drafting the patent for Chancellor Zhū with words taboo so that the yímá had to be altered, and his entry on Xiè Xiǎndào 謝顯道 [Xiè Liángzuǒ] originally not having entered the dǎngjí (Yuányòu blacklist) — with Zhū Zhèn 朱震 begging for office on the dǎngjí model — both are wrong. The patent for Zhū had an imperial order for Qí Chǔhòu 綦處厚 to alter it, not for Chén to alter it himself. Xiè Xiǎndào did in fact enter the blacklist in Chóngníng 1. Jǐngsī was recording what he had heard at the time; the slips are inadvertent, but as they might mislead historians I have for that reason corrected them.” So there are weak points; but a slight blemish does not cancel the merit of the whole.

Abstract

Xiè Jí’s own preface, dated Shàoxīng 11, fifth month, thirteenth day (1141, at Yángxià), supplies the book’s intellectual program: the sìliù style begins as a Six-Dynasties development on the older simple prose forms, comes into focus during the early Táng and matures under Northern-Sòng masters Ōuyáng Xiū and Wáng Ānshí — the latter pair he credits with “washing away the Xīkūn school’s hacked and trivial body”. The book was written in retirement at Língshí mountain (“after years in the hills, eating my fill and idle all day”), prompted by the questions of younger men who wanted to know what the older generation had said about the genre. Xiè explicitly likens his project to the shīhuà tradition: “Just as there are old shīhuà for the five-and-seven character form, so let this be the sìliù tán zhǔ.”

The book contains roughly seventy entries. Its three theoretical pillars are: (i) the proper function of sìliù as the form of xuāndú 宣讀, i.e. material to be proclaimed aloud — hence the four- and six-character cadences, not full-length parallel sentences; (ii) the doctrine that jiǎncái (selective cutting and editing) is the real craft, against the late-Xuānhé and Southern-Sòng vogue for whole-clause-against-whole-clause parallelism; (iii) the priority of yì (meaning) over cí (diction). Many of the technical examples are drawn from the late-Northern-Sòng masters Wāng Zǎo, Sūn Dí 孫覿, Liào Mínglüè, and Chén Yǔyì, of whom Xiè’s father Kèjiā and great-uncle Liángzuǒ had been close associates. Fèi Gǔn’s Liángxī mànzhì records two slips, both involving the high politics of the Yuányòu purge that Xiè had heard about from family elders; these the Sìkù editors take as a tax on the work’s value, not as a fatal defect.

The book has been transmitted continuously since Zuǒ Guī’s Bǎichuān xuéhǎi of the late Sòng — first under the rubric “Língshíshān yàoliáo” anonymously — through the Míng Bǎichuān reprintings and into the Sìkù recension (from a submission by the Wāng Qǐshū 汪啟淑 family). The modern Sòng shīhuà quán biān edition is standard. With Wáng Zhì’s Sìliù huà KR4i0016, it is one of the two basic source-texts for the study of Sòng piánwén.

Translations and research

• Guō Shào-yǔ 郭紹虞, Sòng shīhuà kǎo 宋詩話考 (Zhōnghuá, 1979), 116–119 — bibliographical study and the principal modern account of Xiè’s relationship to his family’s Cheng-school lineage.
• Wú Wén-zhì 吳文治 et al., comp., Sòng shīhuà quán biān 宋詩話全編 (Jiāng-sū guǎn-líng, 1998), vol. 4 — the standard modern edition.
• Dīng Fú-bǎo 丁福保, ed., Lì-dài shīhuà xù-biān 歷代詩話續編 (1916; rpt. Zhōnghuá, 1983) — includes the work.
• Chén Yǔ-yú 陳郁茹, “Xiè Jí Sì-liù tán zhǔ yánjiū” 謝伋《四六談麈》研究, M.A. thesis, Sūzhōu University (2010) — recent comprehensive study.

Other points of interest

The book is one of only two Sòng works (with Wáng Zhì’s Sìliù huà) that take sìliù as their explicit subject; together they preserve the entire premodern theory of the genre. Xiè’s exhortation against the late-Sòng tendency to “whole-clause-on-whole-clause” parallelism anticipates the criticism Liú Kèzhuāng 劉克莊 and Yán Yǔ 嚴羽 would soon level against the same pattern in lyric verse. The work’s title tán zhǔ — “talks-whisk” — is an unusual coinage that probably owes its currency in later Sòng book-titles (cf. the various zhǔ tán compounds) to this work.

Links

• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §30.5.
• Kyoto Zinbun Sìkù tíyào
• Wikipedia 四六談麈