談龍錄

Tánlóng lù 談龍錄

A Record of Talk about the Dragon by 趙執信 (撰)

About the work

The Tánlóng lù 談龍錄, in one juǎn, is Zhào Zhíxìn 趙執信 (1662–1744)‘s polemical shīhuà directed against the shényùn 神韻 doctrine of his estranged teacher and uncle-by-marriage Wáng Shìzhēn 王士禎 (1634–1711). The title is taken from the work’s opening anecdote: Hóng Shēng 洪昇 had said poetry should be “rú lóng rán” — like a dragon, with head and tail, claws and horns, scales and crest, all complete; Wáng had replied that poetry should be “rú shénlóng” — like a divine dragon, where one sees only the head and not the tail, or only a flash of claw and scale in the clouds; Zhào, present at the exchange, replied that the divine dragon’s head and tail are intact even when only one scale or claw is visible — i.e. the apparent fragment is the whole made visible. The figure becomes the structural heart of Zhào’s case against Wáng: shényùn cannot be invoked to license the absence of rén 人 (the person, the human reality) from the poem.

The work consists of thirty-odd entries, including a substantial preface by Zhào explaining the genesis of his break with Wáng. It is one of the most important Qīng shīhuà and was banned from circulation by Wáng’s many disciples; it survives in the Sìkù recension over against an expurgated Yángzhōu printing which the Sìkù editors explicitly reject in favour of the original.

Tiyao

Tánlóng lù, one juǎn. By Zhào Zhíxìn of our dynasty. Zhíxìn was Wáng Shìzhēn’s nephew by marriage; at first they got on very well; later, after Zhíxìn asked Wáng to write a preface to his Guānhǎi jí 觀海集 and did not get it, they came to be at odds. Because Shìzhēn had said, in conversation with his disciples on poetry, that a poem should be like a dragon among the clouds — only one scale or one claw glimpsed at a time — Zhíxìn wrote this book to refute him. The main thesis is: in a poem there must be a person (shī zhī zhōng dāng yǒu rén zài 詩之中當有人在).

He calls Shìzhēn’s farewell poem from Lúgōu Bridge (from the Nánhǎi jí 南海集), with the lines “at Lúgōu Bridge gazing at the setting sun, the wind and dust grow dark; the ten-thousand lǐ journey begins from here, my solitary heart — with whom shall I share it?” the words of a banished minister or exiled wanderer. He also cites Wú Xiūlíng 吳脩齡 (Qiáo 喬)‘s remark calling Shìzhēn “Qīngxiù Lǐ Yúlín” (the qīngxiù Lǐ Pānlóng) — i.e. a refined version of the late-Míng Archaist. Though writing in indignation and not without polemical excess, his book is in fact a timely warning: the shényùn theory, in unskilled hands, easily slips into floating sound (fú xiǎng 浮響). Shī Rùnzhāng 施閏章’s “ornamental tower” analogy (Huāyán lóugé) and Wāng Wǎn 汪琬’s “Sìchuān brocade-weaver” warning — and Shìzhēn himself once acknowledged them in his own notes — show that Zhíxìn’s book is at root a precautionary critique against an emerging vice.

Lately a Yángzhōu printing of this book, wishing to mediate between the two schools, has gone so far as to gut from the record all the language attacking Shìzhēn — a printing entirely contrary to Zhíxìn’s authorial intent and to that extent unfaithful. We here preserve the original recension and append our own assessment of its excesses as above. Respectfully collated, Qiánlóng 43, 2nd month (1778). Director-General Compilers: Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. Director-General Collator: Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.

Abstract

The Tánlóng lù is the principal Qīng shīhuà polemic and one of the most-cited Chinese literary-critical texts of the dynasty. It is the manifest counter-document to Wáng Shìzhēn’s shényùn programme — the theoretical companion to Zhào’s prosodic Shēngdiào pǔ KR4i0060 — and the only systematic attack on Wáng’s poetics composed by an insider with full access to the master’s practice. Zhào’s preface is unusually candid about the personal-and-doctrinal genesis of the break: as a young man he had refused to enter Wáng’s formal master-disciple relationship; he had nevertheless privately extracted Wáng’s prosodic secrets and tried to teach others by them (Wáng said “zǐ wù wàng yǔ rén” — “Sir, do not casually tell others”); his successor disciples in Wáng’s circle slandered him; and after Wáng’s name had been pinned to ill-considered family eulogies of Zhào’s ancestor Qīngzhǐ gōng with editorial liberties, the rupture became final.

The doctrinal substance of the work is the formula “shī zhī zhōng dāng yǒu rén zài” — “in a poem there must be a person.” Zhào borrows from Wú Qiáo 吳喬 (Wú Xiūlíng), whose Wéilú shīhuà 圍爐詩話 he praises as “the most refined”. The principle is that a poem must take its bearing from the historical-moral situation of the actual person who composed it — shī yán zhì in its original Confucian acceptation — and not float free in shényùn abstraction. Zhào’s secondary thesis, equally pointed, is that shényùn without shēngdiào is impossible to teach and impossible to learn: Wáng’s withholding of prosodic instruction was an institutional vice, and Zhào’s own Shēngdiào pǔ is the corrective.

The work also records a number of specific corrections to Wáng’s Tángxián sānmèi jí 唐賢三昧集 (KR4h0257) made by Yán Ruòqú 閻若璩 (the great kǎozhèng scholar): Wáng Wéi’s “Yùtíng shàng” misread as “Xiètíng”, Mèng Hàorán’s “Cényáng” misread as “Xúnyáng”, Zǔ Yǒng’s “Jīngshuǐ” misread as “Jīngshuǐ” 涇 — substantive geographical errors that Wáng had not corrected in subsequent printings, and which Zhào documents as evidence that shényùn-mode editing is not adequate to the historical reality of the poems. The Sìkù editors register this section approvingly.

Composition window. The work bears Zhào’s signed preface but no date. Internal evidence places it after Wáng Shìzhēn’s death in 1711 — the preface speaks of Wáng as wángyǒu 亡友 (“departed friend”), and the body of the text speaks of Wáng’s poetic doctrines in the past tense. The terminus ad quem is determined by external circulation: by the 1720s the work was already known to Wāng Yuán 汪沅 (Yángzhōu) and the expurgated printing had appeared. The standard bracket is therefore 1709–1715 (some scholarly opinion places it as early as 1709 if “wángyǒu” is read as a literary trope; others insist on a post-1711 date). The work is the principal late writing of Zhào Zhíxìn.

Editorial history. The Sìkù editors’ decision to publish the original recension over the expurgated Yángzhōu printing — and their explicit polemic against the latter — is one of the most consequential editorial acts of the Sìkù project in the shīwén píng division. The Yángzhōu printing had removed all anti-Wáng material in an effort at “mediation”; the Sìkù editors correctly recognize that the polemic is structurally constitutive of the work and refuse the expurgation. Modern reprints follow the Sìkù recension.

Translations and research

• Guō Shào-yú 郭紹虞, ed. Qīng shī-huà 清詩話, 2 vols. Shàng-hǎi: Zhōnghuá, 1963 — includes the Tán-lóng lù.
• Chén Mǎn-míng 陳邁明, ed. Tán-lóng lù jiào-jiān 談龍錄校箋. Bĕijīng: Rénmín wénxué, 1981 — the standard critical edition.
• Richard John Lynn, “Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: Wang Shih-chen’s Theory of Poetry and its Antecedents”, in The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism, ed. W. T. de Bary (Columbia, 1975), pp. 217–69 — treats Zhào’s polemic in detail.
• Daniel Bryant, “The Tán-lóng lù and the End of Wáng Shì-zhēn’s Authority”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 113.3 (1993): 423–442.
• Zhāng Jiàn 張健, Qīng-dài shī-xué yán-jiū. Bĕijīng: Bĕi-jīng dà-xué, 1999, ch. 3.
• Wáng Xiǎo-shū 王曉舒, Zhào Zhí-xìn shī-xué yán-jiū 趙執信詩學研究. Shàng-hǎi: Shàng-hǎi gǔ-jí, 2013.

Other points of interest

The Tánlóng lù and the Shēngdiào pǔ together constitute Zhào’s two-pronged attack on Wáng Shìzhēn’s poetic establishment. The pair is unique in the history of Chinese literary criticism for the directness with which a disciple repudiates a master while remaining technically dependent on the master’s methods. The episode’s reverberations continue into the late Qīng: Wēng Fānggāng 翁方綱 (whose own Shízhōu shīhuà 石洲詩話 attempts a third-way jīlǐ 肌理 theory) takes Zhào’s critique seriously, and modern intellectual histories from the Qīngshī jìshì down treat the Tánlóng lù as the founding moment of Qīng critical pluralism.

The expurgated Yángzhōu printing, which the Sìkù editors rejected, survives in some private collections and is occasionally consulted by Chinese scholars as a witness to early-Qīng “harmonising” reception of Wáng Shìzhēn.

Links

• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §27 (literary criticism); §50.2 (Kāngxī literary world).
• Kyoto Zinbun Sìkù tíyào
• Wikidata Q11108546 (談龍錄).