Abstract
Petrarch’s ascent of the highest mountain in Provence on April 26, 1336 CE, has been interpreted as a turning point in European environmental philosophy. For Petrarch, the allure of mountains to the human mind is a dangerous seduction as it brings him away from God, inviting a curiosity in the material world and in the self as a material object immersed in that world. In China, it was the Six Dynasties period (222–589 CE) that inaugurated a new aesthetic mode of interacting with mountain environments. Through a comparative reading, this essay suggests that the representation of phenomenological encounters with mountains in the Chinese poetic tradition offers a powerful contrastive paradigm to the Petrarchan model of eco-mimesis. These mountain-moments represent textual, highly crafted acts, a scripted re-performance of an encounter with physical nature, but they do so according to each culture’s specific understanding of the proper relation between the mind and more-than-human world.
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Notes
Prominent theorists of the posthuman include Bennett (2010), Braidotti (2013), and Morton (2013) who develop the material turn of Latour (1993). Ecocritical work is preoccupied with the agency or vitality of entities that have been undervalued in our systems of meaning: animals, objects, plants, geophysical structures etc.
‘In modern China, “traditional poetry” (also called “classical”) refers to gu shi 古詩 (old poetry) and encompasses poetic writing since Antiquity to the end of the imperial era’ (Lamova 2017).
In addition to the philosophical background of concordance, this is also partly due to the misguided yet tenacious belief that Chinese characters are non-phonetic and directly represent the thing they stand in for. The best antidote to the various essentializing myths pertaining to Chinese characters remains DeFrancis (1984).
Scigaj (1999) is a notable example. In his focus on American nature writers and his categorical opposition to experience as necessarily mediated by language that shapes and changes what we can know of it, Scigaj is less useful for analysing premodern poetry’s relation to the natural world.
For a useful summary of the history of Daoist cultivation practices and their interaction with mountains from the fifth to the second century BC, see Michael (2016).
See Analects, 6.23: ‘The wise find joy in water; the benevolent find joy in mountains.’ (子曰: 知者樂水, 仁者樂山) (Confucius 1963, 84). Translation by D.C. Lau.
See, for example, Zhang (2012, 3) on the unique phenomenological approach of Xie Lingyun (385–433 CE). Xie is widely acknowledged as the world’s first mountaineer who brings to the reader the experience of ‘nature-in-sensation.’ This cannot help but recall the Romantic cri de coeur: ‘back to nature.’
For a useful summary, see Hsieh (1994).
Knechtges (2012, 44) cites the Song shu (The Book of Song) account from the fifth century: ‘He had a large corps of slaves and retainers who did the work of what one source characterizes as “boring through mountains and draining lakes.”’ Knechtges describes Xie as ‘a demanding taskmaster’ (2012, 44).
See Cheng (2007) for the materialist take on the political and economic implications of Xie’s cataloguing of his entire estate’s contents.
Xie created the world’s first mountain clog. The Song shu records this delightful foray into material culture: ‘When climbing, he often wore wooden clogs which, upon ascending, he would detach the grooves of the front sole, and when descending, detach the grooves of the heel’ (Quoted in Huang 2010, 54).
Schafer explains that the concept of a ‘Taoist spirit condemned to spend a spell on earth for the infraction of some celestial taboo … is a commonplace of Tang lore and literature’ (1977, 129).
His poem ‘A summer day in the mountains’ 夏日山中 contains the exquisite lines: ‘Too lazy to wave my fan of white plumes; / Rather go naked beneath the greenwood trees’ (Watson 1984, 210).
For a new materialist reading of Li Bai’s famous moon sequence, see Harper (2020).
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the editors of this special edition Benjamin Ridgway and Evan Nicoll-Johnson for all their careful and exacting work in putting together an issue of this scope and ambition. I also extend thanks to the editors at postmedieval. It was a joy working with them.
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Harper, E. Mountains, meaning, mediation: Petrarch’s ‘Ascent to Mont Ventoux’ (1336) and the ecological imagination of classical Chinese poetry. Postmedieval 14, 647–667 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-023-00293-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-023-00293-z