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

in terms of that culture. A poem’s language is not autonomous. It is both an individual expression of forms and ideas drawn from the conceptual world of language and a comment on that same world. Interestingly, Quentin Skinner, arguing that the understanding of texts entails an understanding of both “what they were intended to mean and how that meaning was intended to be taken,” comes to a very similar understanding of the nature of the relationship between text and language: one “must delineate the whole range of communications which could have been conventionally performed on the given occasion by the utterance of the given utterance, and, next to trace the relations between the given utterance and this wider linguistic context as a means of decoding the actual intention of the given writer.”¹⁰ This Skinner applies equally to literary texts and to political texts. The idea that the individual use of language depends for its meaning on a wider linguistic context is the key point for this study. To this extent Skinner’s concept of political language is instructive, though my purpose is not to get at the intention of the poet but rather to gain an understanding of the ideas contained in the poem.

This concept of language is consistent with the role of the textual tradition in Chinese civilization. Lewis argues that the formation of the Chinese empire and its institutional apparatus was until the end of the Han a complex interaction between the realities of politics on the one hand and canon formation and textual culture on the other—a dynamic between “the textual realm and administrative reality”—that ended with the final triumph of the former with the fall of the Han: “Thus when the reality of imperial power collapsed, it survived as a dream, or rather as a mass of signs, in the parallel realm formed by the canon and its associated texts,” the Chinese conceptual world and authority structure of language in Pocock’s formulation or the wider linguistic world in Skinner’s. The later dynasties, according to this argument, were acts of “recreating the order articulated in these literary works.”¹¹ This is because “true kingship was preserved not in contemporary rulers but in texts,” texts that “created a model for society against which actual institutions were measured.”¹² One need not fully agree with Lewis’s argument