View/Open - University of Victoria
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134<br />
emanating from Cen Shen's thermal frontier is still marked by an unusual and intimidating character<br />
rarely visited by Tang poets 12 . Chapter four <strong>of</strong> this thesis briefly outlined the critical habit <strong>of</strong> reading<br />
these hinterlands through a prism <strong>of</strong> the strange and wonderful (qi 奇 ). And while this section <strong>of</strong><br />
chapter five will also visit Cen Shen's topographically peculiar, it will not be with the goal <strong>of</strong> mining<br />
rare moods and precious sights. Instead, the motivation is to investigate the perceptual facet <strong>of</strong> the poetnarrators<br />
in Cen Shen's “hot” landscape poems, and show how despite belonging to different poems the<br />
poet-narrators nonetheless still focalize the landscape in similar fashions. This pattern <strong>of</strong> focalization is<br />
not merely a case <strong>of</strong> images – the focalized objects – being repeated throughout the texts. Rather, this<br />
chapter contends that certain aspects <strong>of</strong> how the poet-narrators focalize the landscape in Cen Shen's<br />
thermal frontier landscape poems, 13 the manner in which they “see” the landscape, is repeated across<br />
the poems and thus links them intertextually. 14<br />
One <strong>of</strong> these aspects <strong>of</strong> focalization is the similarity among the poems in the presentation <strong>of</strong> the<br />
thermal theme and its initial sub-thematic development; a farther reaching characteristic is the<br />
similarity <strong>of</strong> lenses used by the poet-narrators both in ordinary and imaginary modes <strong>of</strong> focalization to<br />
focalize sub-themes <strong>of</strong> the landscape's heat, a burning maelstrom which is also apprehended as<br />
wreacking great meteorological havoc against the broader world 15 <strong>of</strong> the poems.<br />
12 Ronald Miao, “T'ang Frontier Poetry”, p. 128 and Marie Chan, “The Frontier Poems <strong>of</strong> Ts'en Shen”, p. 428. Having the<br />
greatest knowledge <strong>of</strong> Central Asian geography among Chinese poets, Cen Shen's most conspicuous contributions to the<br />
frontier poetry, the subgenre for which he is best remembered, are on topics such as the heat and volcanic lakes <strong>of</strong> the far<br />
northwestern region, topics previously unknown in Chinese poetry. See Marie Chan's entry in William H. Nienhauser,<br />
The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, p. 798.<br />
13 These poems, where Cen Shen's “hot” landscapes feature prominently, are “Passing Fire Mountain” 经 火 山 ; “ Parting:<br />
Song <strong>of</strong> Fire Mountain Clouds” 火 山 云 歌 送 别 ; “Song <strong>of</strong> Hot Lake: Sending Off Censor Cui on his Return to the<br />
Capital” 热 海 行 送 催 侍 御 还 京 ; and to a lesser extent the opening <strong>of</strong> “Mission to Jiaohe Commandery” (“Shi<br />
Jiaohequn” 使 交 河 群 ). See the first appendix <strong>of</strong> this thesis for their full translations.<br />
14 An intertextual reading means reading “literary works not [as]...autonomous entities, 'organic wholes', but [as]<br />
intertextual constructs: sequences which have meaning in relations to other texts...”. See Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit <strong>of</strong><br />
Signs: Semiotics, Literature and Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell <strong>University</strong> Press, 1981), p. 38. The “meaning” <strong>of</strong><br />
greatest interest here is the method itself by which Cen Shen's poet-narrators “see” the thermal landscape through<br />
manners <strong>of</strong> focalization found across the boundaries <strong>of</strong> individual poems, manners that are repeated in separate poems<br />
which when read against each other reveal similarities in not just what is focalized but how it is focalized. See also the<br />
second chapter <strong>of</strong> this thesis for a brief discussion <strong>of</strong> intertextuality as it pertains, in a limited way, to a juxtaposed<br />
reading <strong>of</strong> Cen Shen's and Bao Zhao's frontier poetry.<br />
15 “World” here meaning the macro-space within which existents <strong>of</strong> the setting are selected by the focalizer for attention, or