The Lady and Her Scribes_Dealing with the Multiple Dunhuang Copies

25 the lady and her scribes christopher m. b. nugent The Lady and Her Scribes: Dealing with the Multiple Dunhuang Copies of Wei Zhuang’s “Lament of the Lady of Qin” I n T r o D u C T I o n Like medieval European literature, written poetry in Tang-dynasty .China was always produced, and almost always circulated and re- ceived, by means of handwritten manuscripts. Yet while scholars of medieval European literature have devoted considerable attention to the issues at stake when approaching texts produced before the age of print, research on Tang poetry, whether in Asia or the West, has paid little attention to these studies and what relevance they might have for the study of the production and circulation of poetic literature in the particular manuscript culture of the Tang.1 This state of affairs is understandable: as much European literature considered to be medi- eval was produced more recently than the Tang and was written not on paper but on the far more durable (if expensive and difficult to manufacture) media of parchment or velum,2 a good deal of it is still extant. China’s early invention and use of paper, a cheaper but also more fragile material, did mean that literacy and textual production were substantially more wide-spread and common among the upper classes in Tang dynasty China than they were within the same group in medieval Europe. Woodblock printing, which began in the Tang and 1 There are some exceptions to this generalization. Stephen owen notes the importance of textual history of Tang poetry and laments how little we know about it in The Great Age of Chinese Poetry (new Haven: Yale u.P., 1981), pp. 323–24, fn. 5. Xu Jun is one of the few Chi- nese scholars to deal with the specific issues of manuscript transmission of Tang poetry. See Xu Jun 徐俊, ed., Dunhuang shiji canjuan jikao 敦煌詩集殘卷輯考 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000), pp. 8–52. For Chinese reading practices from the Six Dynasties through the Song and the impact of woodblock printing, see Jean-Pierre Drège, “La Lecture et l’écriture en Chine et la xylographie,” Études chinoise 9 (1991), pp. 77–111. 2  It has been estimated that a single copy of the Book of Kells produced around 800 ad required the slaughter of a herd of 150 calves. See Ingo F. Walther and norbert Wolf, Co- dices illustres: The World’s Most Famous Illustrated Manuscripts, 400–1600 (Köln: Taschen, 2001), p. 18. 26 christopher m. b. nugent expanded greatly in succeeding periods, further ensured that modern scholars studying the Tang would enjoy access to sources whose great number and variety would be the envy of European medievalists. Yet the fragility of paper meant that the numerous and wide-spread texts were less able than parchment to withstand the forces of time and na- ture. Chinese sources thus very rarely include physical texts that have survived from the Tang itself. With a paucity of actual manuscripts to study, it is not surprising scholars have not made researching the pe- culiarities of manuscripts a priority. The aim of the present study is to begin filling this gap, for schol- ars of Tang literature are indeed not completely bereft of extant Tang dynasty texts; the cache of manuscripts found in the Dunhuang cave system in northwest China near the turn of the twentieth century pro- vides us with tens of thousands of them. My particular focus will be eight Dunhuang manuscript copies of the late-Tang poet Wei Zhuang’s 韋莊 (836–910) lengthy narrative poem on the sack of Chang’an 長安 during the Huang Chao 黃巢 rebellion in the late-ninth century, “Qinfu yin” 秦婦吟 (“Lament of the Lady of Qin”). rather than address the poem as a literary work as others have done,3 I approach the manuscripts as distinctly physical objects whose numerous differences may well be as important as their similarities to our understanding of the actual material contexts in which Tang poetry was produced and circulated. The theoretical basis for this approach does not come from traditional and modern work on Tang poetry itself; it instead grows out of recent scholarship on medieval European manuscripts that in turn takes much of its inspiration from deconstructionalist and post-structuralist literary theory of the past twenty-five years. In what follows I will give a brief 3  See, for example, robin D. S. Yates, Washing Silk: The Life and Selected Poetry of Wei Chuang (834?-910) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1988), and Dore Levy, Chinese Narrative Poetry: The Late Han through T’ang Dynasties (Durham: Duke u.P., 1988). “Qinfu yin” was one of the first poetic works from the manuscripts to enjoy concerted scholarly attention. Lionel Giles, in his 1926 T’oung Pao article, “The Lament of the Lady of Ch’in,” describes discovering three manuscript copies of the poem in the Stein collection of manuscripts in 1919, just over a decade after Stein took them from Dunhuang. These are the manuscripts that later came to be numbered S692, S5476, and S5477; T P 24.4 (1926), pp. 305–80. The great Chinese scholar Wang Guowei 王國維 had previously discussed the content and dating of the poem in his 1923 article “Wei Zhuang de Qinfu yin” 韋莊的秦婦吟, Beida guoxue ji kan 北大國學季刊 1.4 (1923), pp. 693–99. For other early scholarship on the poem see Xu, Dunhuang shiji, pp. 230–31. See also Chen Yinke 陳寅恪, “Du ‘Qinfu yin’” 讀秦婦吟, Qinghua xuebao 清華學報 11.4 (1936), pp. 951–68. For a summary of various readings of the poem, including recent Marxist criticisms of Wei Zhuang as a reactionary, see Gao Guofan 高國藩, Dunhuang suwenhua xue 敦煌俗文化學 (Shanghai: Shanghai sanlian shudian, 1999), pp. 514–22. Finally, most of the important (and less important) pre-1990 Chinese scholarship on the poem, including many of the articles cited above, can be found in Yan Tingliang 顏 廷亮 and Zhao Yiwu 趙以武, eds., Qinfu yin yanjiu huilu 秦婦吟研究彙錄 (Shanghai: Shang- hai guji, 1990). 27 the lady and her scribes introduction to some of the pertinent approaches to textual criticism current in the West and how they relate to the situation in pre-print China. I will then turn my attention to the “Qinfu yin” manuscripts themselves and examine what these documents can and cannot tell us about how Tang poetry existed during the Tang itself. T E X T u A L C r I T I C I S M I n T H E W E S T If scholars of Tang literature have made up some ground on our Europeanist counterparts by now having primary source material to study, we still lag behind them in developing methodologically and theoretically sound approaches to this material. I believe that we have much to learn from the work that has already been done on medieval European manuscripts: both the successes and failures of these studies can be of great assistance to scholars of Tang manuscripts as we develop our own approaches. In what follows I will thus give a brief outline of some of the important trends in Western textual criticism over the last century. This discussion is by no means meant to be exhaustive and will focus primarily on those aspects of Western textual criticism that are most applicable to circumstances surrounding the production and circulation of Tang poetry. one major branch of Western textual criticism has concerned it- self primarily with working backwards from extant texts to recreate an author’s imagined autograph.4 As Paul Mass has stated, “We have no autograph manuscripts of the Greeks and roman classical writers and no copies which have been collated with the originals; the manuscripts we possess derive from the originals through an unknown number of intermediate copies… . The business of textual criticism is to produce a text as close as possible to the original (constitution textus).”5 Maas and many others took as their methodological basis the Lachmannian or recensionist method (developed by the Prussian scholar Karl Lach- mann; 1793–1851) of grouping extant texts into stemma and working backwards to create a text containing the least “scribal ‘corruption.’”6 Though practitioners held that the recensionist method allowed the edi- tor to identify and eliminate errors and variation objectively, without 4  I use the term “text” in this study to refer to actual physical texts, not in the broader sense that it has come to have in recent literary criticism. 5  Paul Maas (Barbara Flower, trans.), Textual Criticism (oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 1. 6  Elizabeth J. Bryan, Collaborative Meaning in Medieval Scribal Culture: The Otho Laӡamon (Ann Arbor: university of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 48. See also James Thorpe, Principles of Textual Criticism (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1972), p. 108. 28 christopher m. b. nugent having recourse to a vague sense of literary judgment, it suffers from a number of flaws that eventually caused it to fall out of favor. First, it assumes that any one scribe would have been working from only a single copy text. The possibility otherwise would arise that he would “contaminate” a particular stemma by mixing families.7 Though the issue here is with written texts, there is ample reason to believe that medieval European scribes (and those of Tang China) would not only use more than one copy text, but might also copy down parts of a work from memory, using the copy texts to fill in where their memory fal- tered. In either case textual contamination is always a real possibility regardless of its methodological inconvenience. Second, it depends on the counterintuitive idea that alteration of texts in the course of transmission happens in a very particular and consistent fashion and that scribes are mechanical in their reproduc- tion of previous errors but unreliable in that they will inevitably in- troduce new ones. As Bernard Cerquiglini states, this form of textual criticism would collapse if it was forced to “think that a scribe, when confronted with an uncertain reading, for example, might be able to improve it or indeed even rediscover the ‘original’ reading.”8 Again, the only real justification for this assumption is that the internal logic of this particular method requires it. The recensionists thus not only desire to return to a pristine origin, they require an oddly pristine pro- cess of degeneration to accomplish this task. Lachmannian-based approaches to textual criticism remained in- fluential well into the 1960s, but as early as the first decades of the twentieth century, many scholars sought alternatives. Joseph Bédier focused on using his own knowledge of the literature in addition to “such criteria as coherence of sense, regularity of spelling, and form of grammar,” to find a single “best text” from among extant witnesses, and reproducing it faithfully with little editing.9 Bédier did not deny that changes occur in the course of transmission, but rather felt that there 7  See Thomas G. Tansell, Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing (Charlottesville: u.P. of Virginia, 1990), p. 306. Bernard Cerquiglini opines of this sort of textual criticism that it is a “bourgeois, paternalist, and hygienist system of thought about the family; it cherishes filiation, tracks down adulterers, and is afraid of contamination”; Cerquiglini (Betsy Wing, trans.), In Praise of the Variant (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins u.P., 1999), p. 49. 8  Cerquiglini, Praise of the Variant, p. 49. See also Thorpe, Principles of Textual Criticism, p. 112: “A text is never self-correcting or self-rejuvenating, and the ordinary history of the transmission of a text, without the intervention of author or editor, is one of progressive de- generation.” Though often critical of the Lachmannian approach, Thorpe seems to agree with its basic concept of unidirectional textual degeneration. 9  See Thorpe, Principles of Textual Criticism, p. 114; Tanselle, Textual Criticism, pp. 309– 11; and Cerquiglini, Praise of the Variant, pp. 54–71. 29 the lady and her scribes was rarely a legitimate basis from which one could identify and clas- sify such changes. In this view, recensionists want to eliminate history and its contingencies while Bédier and his followers embrace a text’s evolution and the fundamental materiality it displays.10 Much as the “best text” approach of Bédier might seem the com- plete antithesis of Lachmannian recensionism, they share a vulner- ability to certain critiques. Both approaches ultimately fall back on personal judgment, whether in the identification of errors or in the choice of a “best text” and the slight editorial emendations which are made to it. And Lachmann and Bédier equally sought to bring an air of the scientific to their endeavors, the former by embracing a carefully articulated method and the latter by attempting to avoid the errors and contradictions that would inevitably arise in creating a complex sys- tem of analysis. A. E. Housman succinctly punctured textual criticism’s pretensions to true science by stating that such a practitioner “engaged upon his business is not at all like newton investigating the motions of the planets: he is much more like a dog hunting for fleas.”11 Beginning in the 1980s, an increasing number of studies of me- dieval European literature have taken up the ideas and terminology of more recent literary and cultural theory.12 The new approaches ex- emplified by these works have soundly rejected the illusory certainty of the recensionist method. And while owing a substantial intellectual debt to Bédier, they have also moved well beyond the idea of a “best text.” Modern medieval studies is a diverse field, and I will limit my discussion of these new approaches (that have sometimes been called “the new medievalism”13) to a set of issues especially pertinent to my examination of the “Qinfu yin” manuscripts: the repudiation of the au- thor as the final and preeminent determinant of meaning, the rejection of a critical text as a primary object of critical attention, an increased focus on the materiality of actual medieval manuscripts, and the idea that such new approaches to medieval texts actually represent a return to more typically medieval modes of experiencing texts. 10  See David F. Hult, “reading it right: The Ideology of Text Editing,” in Marina S. Brown- lee et al. eds., The New Medievalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins u.P., 1991), p. 122. 11  A. E. Housman, “The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism,” in Selected Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge u.P., 1961), p. 132. Cited in Thorpe, Principles of Textual Criti- cism, p. 126. 12  For a general introduction and complaints that this new orientation was long overdue, see Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, “Introduction: Critical Theory and the Study of the Middle Ages,” in idem, eds., Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers (Ithaca: Cor- nell u.P., 1987), pp. 1–11. 13  See Brownlee, New Medievalism, pp. 1–2. 30 christopher m. b. nugent recent studies of secular medieval literature have largely aban- doned any notion of the author as Lachmannian heroic creator of the pristine autographic manuscript. They thus reject one of the primary goals of earlier textual criticism: to come as close as possible to reclaim- ing this Eden of authorial intent. Scholars’ justifications for rejecting this model are varied. For some, such as Elizabeth Bryan, the theoreti- cal issue of structural authority influences their approach.14 John Da- genais and others see author-centric approaches as inappropriate for the study of manuscript cultures as such a perspective “carries with it both the implicit model of the printed book and all the baggage of the academic study of literary canons.”15 Printed texts, in Gerald Burns’s formulation, are closed. That is, they have reached a final form as “print closes off the act of writing and authorizes the results.”16 The author- ized results are the property of the author as creator. Manuscripts, in- stead, follow what Bryan characterizes as roland Barthes’s model of the “open, unendingly processual text.”17 under such a model the au- thor loses control at what may be an early point in the life of a work. others can add, delete, and alter. In doing so they establish claims of their own on a work’s meaning. none of these medievalists go as far as to proclaim the author dead. They do, however, see him as operating in a larger context in which he is no longer the prime mover. recent studies thus emphasize the idea of medieval writing as a collaborative endeavor in which the scribe plays a role equal in importance to the author. The debt to Bédier, with his acknowledgement that he “could not affirm the difference between an intelligent or gifted scribe and an author” is obvious here.18 neverthe- less, the scribe remained the transmitter and translator of the author, rather than a true collaborator creating meaning together with the au- thor and others. Dagenais, on the other hand, strikingly leaves out the author entirely, arguing that “The manuscript text is constituted by the individuals who created it: scribe, rubricator, corrector, illuminator,”19 Authors do have a role to play in these new approaches to medieval texts, but it is as part of an ensemble cast. 14  Bryan, Collaborative Meaning, p. 52. 15  John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture (Princeton: Princeton u.P., 1994), p. xvii. 16  Gerald L. Bruns, “The originality of Texts in a Manuscript Culture,” Comparative Lit- erature 32.2 (1980),p. 113. 17  Bryan, Collaborative Meaning, p. 52. 18  David F. Hult, “reading it right: The Ideology of Text Editing” in Brownlee, The New Medievalism, p. 124. 19  Degenais, Ethics of Reading, p. 17. 31 the lady and her scribes Connected to the lowered position of the author in recent stud- ies is a corresponding negative critique of excessive focus on the cre- ation and use of critical texts. The critical text continues to rely on the phantom of authorial intent and ignores the role of collaborative tex- tual change that better reflects the reality of medieval literary culture. Variation implies a multiplicity of legitimate meanings — a key point of much recent literary theory but anathema to the very concept of a critical text. Focusing on the variation inherent in a manuscript cul- ture, Bryan points out that “Any two manuscripts will embed different sets of traces of signification and erasure, differently configured pro- cesses of meaning.”20 A critical text, on the other hand, proclaims itself as the proper object of study, rather than the messy “fallen world of medieval manuscript textuality” found in actual extant manuscripts.21 But again, this rejection of the critical text is not complete; scholars critical of much traditional textual scholarship acknowledge a role for critical editions. William Paden sees them as “an instrument of com- munication” that provides “transition between the medieval mode of existence of lyric song and a modern mode,”22 while agreeing that the experience of reading a critical text necessarily distances one from the medieval world it purports to convey. These criticisms are best seen as an attempt to remind readers, and scholarly readers in particular, that critical texts are just that, works of criticism. They come with their own sets of judgments and cannot be accepted as transparent conveyors of the reality of medieval literature. The focus on collaboration and a preference for actual manuscripts over critical editions has naturally led to a greater emphasis by recent scholars on the materiality of the textual record. recent scholars see the materiality of manuscripts not as bringing us closer to the author, as Bédier would hold, but to his collaborators. Transcendent meaning belongs to the realm of authorial intention; physical texts are the work of scribes and other participants in a manuscript culture. Bryan suc- cinct