Confucian Prophet: Political Thought In Du Fu’s Poetry (752–757) ...

discourse against which any text must be understood. Therefore, the task of reading a text for its political thought is in large measure one of relating its particular language to the language of the texts constituting that structure of authority, that conceptual world. This brings one to the point where one can begin to deal directly with Du Fu’s language. It displays two aspects through which it both creates its own poetic world and participates in the wider textual realm. These are realism and representation on the one hand and deeper levels of figuration and allegory on the other. The former is conceived and conditioned in terms of the wider world of language, and the latter connects the surface realism to the wider cultural discourse of politics, from which come the ideal standards of political judgment.

Realism and Representation

Here I will introduce a view of realism that extends, but differs from, that explored by other scholars. The implications of how Du’s realism is understood are important for a study of political thought. I will therefore first discuss the prevailing view of Du’s realism and the type of political analysis that emerges from that view before discussing the question of realism from a different angle.

Most scholars emphasize Du’s natural realism. Liu Dajie 劉大杰 describes Du Fu’s poetry as the first mature poetic fruit of a movement in Tang literature away from the “romantic individualism” of Du’s predecessors, and most of his contemporaries, toward a new literature of social realism based in Confucian ethics. Discussing Du’s powers of realistic description, he goes so far as to say that “the life and works of Du Fu then became the history of this [An Lushan–era] social life, and became a true chronicle of that period.”²⁹ For Yoshikawa, this aspect of Du’s language is an important source of the greatness of his poetry. Yoshikawa gives the name “minuteness or elaborateness” to Du’s realism and adds that this feature is crucial to the political impact of his works: